Soda City What this costs you.
Right now, nothing. That will not be true forever, so this page says in advance what we will charge for, what we will never charge for, and what it actually costs to run — down to the dollar. If we ever break a promise on this page, you will have it in writing.
Last updated 4 October 2026 · Columbia, South Carolina
Every part of the product that makes it work — reading your messages, writing back, seeing who is interested, your whole Dating Fingerprint — is free and is staying free. If money ever changes hands, it will be for something extra, never for unlocking something we deliberately switched off.
What it costs today
Nothing, and there is no card on file. There is no trial, no tier, no upsell screen you have to walk past. We are new and nearly empty, and charging for an empty room would be absurd.
We are not going to pretend this is charity. At some point this has to pay for itself. The section below tells you what that actually costs, because we would rather show you the arithmetic than spring a price on you later.
Starter profiles, and why they are here
Soda City Crush is opening with a set of starter profiles, and you should know that before you join. They are not real people. The pictures are generated by a computer — no photograph of any real person is used anywhere in them — and the descriptions are written, not collected.
They exist because of a problem every new dating app has and most solve dishonestly: the first hundred people each arrive to an empty room, leave, and never come back. A city needs a crowd before a crowd will come.
If you message one, a person answers. Not a bot — somebody on our side, writing by hand. There is no automated reply anywhere in this product, and there will not be. What a starter profile cannot do is meet you, so if a conversation is heading that way we will say what it is rather than let it run.
They are temporary and they are shrinking. Each time a real person joins, a starter profile of the same gender is removed. The number only goes one way. When Columbia has filled the room, there will be none left, and this section will say so.
This page previously promised the opposite — that the app would never show an invented member. That promise was made in September 2026 and is no longer one we are keeping, so it has been taken off this page rather than quietly broken. The date at the top changed with it.
What we will never do
These are commitments, not current settings. They are the specific things that made us want to build something else.
- We will never charge you to read or send a message. Somebody reached out to you; standing between you and that is indefensible.
- We will never charge you to see who is interested in you. This is the single most paywalled feature in the industry. It is free here, permanently.
- We will never put your Dating Fingerprint behind a payment. Not the check-ins, not the charts, not the compatibility numbers, not the breakdown of why two people line up.
- We will never sell placement in Discover. Nobody can pay to appear higher in your results, or more often, or at all. What you see is ranked by your answers and nothing else.
- We will never sell a limit back to you. If something is capped, it is capped for safety and it is capped for everyone — see the limits we do have.
- We will never charge different people different prices for the same thing. Not by age, not by device, not by how likely you look to pay. Tinder was sued over the first one.
- We will never auto-renew without telling you first. If a recurring charge ever exists, you get an email before it happens, and cancelling takes one click from your settings.
- We will never sell or rent your data, and we will never take advertising. Both of those make you the product instead of the customer.
Why the other apps feel like that
It is worth being precise about this, because the problem is structural rather than a matter of anyone being greedy.
A subscription dating app makes money when you do not succeed. If you meet someone, you cancel. That single fact shapes everything downstream: the inbox you cannot open, the likes that run out at 3pm, the boost that is really an auction against other people in your city, the profile that gets shown less until you pay. None of it is an accident and none of it is a bug. It is what happens when the business model and the user want opposite outcomes.
The way out is not to promise to be nicer about it. It is to make money from something that only works if people actually meet. That is what the section below is aiming at.
What it costs us to run
These are our own server bills, published so the promises above are checkable instead of just nice-sounding. You are not being quoted anything, now or later.
The numbers are small enough to be disarming, which is rather the point:
| What | What we pay | When it stops being free for us |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting (Netlify) | $0 | 100 GB of traffic a month. The whole site is 2 MB, so that is roughly 50,000 page views. |
| Database, photos, accounts (Supabase) | $0 | 1 GB of photo storage — about 800 members at six photos each. After that we pay $25 a month. |
| Confirmation emails (Resend) | $0 | 3,000 emails a month. |
| sodacitycrush.com | ~$12 a year | — |
Our entire bill is about $25 a month once the site outgrows those free tiers — less than one person's monthly subscription to any of the apps this was built to replace. It is a phone bill, not a salary, and that is precisely why we can make the promises above and mean them.
What this does not cover is anyone's time. This is built by one person in Columbia. If it ever grows past what one person can look after, that will be said out loud on this page before anything about it changes.
How we plan to pay for it
Nothing here is live yet. These are the two directions we would take, in order, and we are writing them down now so you can hold us to the shape of them.
Local places, paying for dates that actually happen
We are one city. That means a coffee shop on Devine Street or a bar in the Vista can sponsor a date spot in a way no national app could ever offer them, and it means our incentive is the right way round for once: we would get paid when people go out, not when they stay single.
If that happens, a sponsored spot will be labelled as sponsored, every time, and it will never touch who you are matched with or the order you see people in. A paid listing changes which bar shows up in a suggestion. It does not change who you meet.
A one-time founding membership
Optional, roughly the price of two coffees, paid once — not monthly. It would buy a small badge that says you were here early and nothing else: no extra reach, no priority, no features, no advantage of any kind over somebody who paid nothing. If that sounds like a bad deal, do not buy it. It exists so the people who want this to survive can help it survive.
The limits we do have, and why they are not for sale
There is one real limit in the product, and it is worth explaining properly because it looks from the outside like the thing we just promised not to do.
You can send one opening message to someone who has not replied to you. One. If they write back, the conversation opens up completely and there are no limits between you ever again. If they do not, you cannot send again until they do. There is also a cap of ten brand-new conversations a day — replies never count towards it, so an ongoing conversation can never use it up.
This exists so that nobody's inbox can be flooded by a stranger, and so that one person cannot message the entire city in an afternoon. It is a safety feature, and the difference between a safety feature and a dark pattern is precisely this:
Not you, not anyone, not for any amount. The moment a limit can be bought, it stops being protection and becomes the product. That is the line, and it is the one we care most about holding.
Replying is never limited. Reading is never limited. Seeing that somebody is interested in you is never limited. The cap applies to cold outbound contact and nothing else.
If any of this changes
This page carries a date at the top, and when something changes the date changes with it. We keep every earlier version, so if you ever want to know what was promised on the day you joined, ask and we will show you. If we ever introduce a charge, you will get an email about it before it exists — not after.
If you think we have broken something on this page, say so: the reporting tools reach a person, not a filter.