Why I Built a Free Product in an Industry Designed to Keep You Paying
Authored by Jehan Rajendra
Most startup advice tells you to find a market, identify a pain point, and build a solution people will pay for. I did two out of three. The third one, the paying part, I deliberately left out. And it turned out to be the most important product decision I made.
I’m the founder of Agilis, a dating app available on iOS and Android worldwide. Every feature – browsing, matching, calling, filtering, is completely free. No subscription tier. No paywall. No “premium” version hiding the good stuff. In an industry where the dominant players generate billions of dollars a year from subscriptions, I built a product that charges users nothing.
Here’s why, and what it taught me about building differently.
The Industry Was Optimising for the Wrong Thing
When I started looking seriously at the dating app market, I wasn’t studying it as an entrepreneur looking for a gap. I was a frustrated user, like millions of others. And what I noticed wasn’t a feature problem, it was an incentive problem.
The major dating apps are structurally disincentivised from helping you find a relationship. Their revenue depends on you staying single, staying subscribed, and staying on the platform. The product that would truly serve you, one that helps you find a genuine connection quickly is the product that kills their business model.
That’s not cynicism. That’s just what subscription economics does to a product when it’s applied to something people fundamentally want to stop needing.
I saw features deliberately gated. Likes artificially limited. Profile visibility throttled unless you paid to boost. The entire experience engineered not around connection, but around the anxiety of missing out on connection because that anxiety is what sells upgrades.
Once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it. And I knew that whatever I built had to start from a completely different premise.
The Business Model Came After the Belief
I didn’t start by asking “how do I monetise this?” I started by asking “what does this product owe the people using it?” The answer I kept coming back to was simple: it owes them a genuine shot at finding someone. Everything else is secondary.
That meant the features had to be free. Not freemium, free. If I locked voice calls, or search filters, or the ability to see who liked you, behind a paywall, I was making the same trade-off the incumbents made. I was putting revenue between the user and the reason they downloaded the app.
The business model I landed on was advertising specifically, geo-targeted advertising through a self-serve Ad Portal built for local businesses. Advertisers target by location and radius, set their own budgets using transparent fixed pricing, and track performance in real time. The user experience stays completely unpaywalled. Revenue comes from businesses wanting to reach a specific local audience, not from users wanting to find a partner.
It’s a clean separation. And it only works because the user base is genuinely engaged people who aren’t frustrated by artificial limits, who aren’t churning because they’ve hit a paywall mid-conversation.
What Building Free Actually Costs You
I want to be honest about this, because the decision wasn’t without trade-offs and it started before the product even existed. Before I built Agilis, I left my previous employer and spent my own savings to bring it to life. There were no investors other than myself. Every £1 I spent had to be a wise decision, because it was money I knew I wouldn’t see back for a long time and yet every £1 was spent willingly, driven by a genuine desire to help people escape the sadness and frustrations they were experiencing on other apps.
Building free means you don’t have the immediate revenue signal that a paid product gives you. You can’t look at subscription conversion rates to know if the product is working. You have to find other ways to measure genuine value engagement depth, retention, the quality of interactions, whether people are actually making connections.
It also means investor conversations are harder, at least initially. “Where’s the revenue?” is the first question, and “advertising, eventually, once we’ve built the user base” is a harder answer than “we charge £9.99 a month and here’s our MRR.” You need to believe in the model, and you need investors who understand that the audience is the asset.
And it means you have to be disciplined about not drifting. The temptation to add a “premium” tier when growth is slower than you’d like is real. Every time I’ve felt that pressure, I’ve come back to the same question: would this feature gate make the product better for the user, or just better for the balance sheet? The answer has always kept us honest.
The Founding Decision Is a Product Decision
What I’ve learned from building Agilis is that your business model isn’t separate from your product, it is your product. The incentive structure you build into your revenue model shapes every feature decision, every design choice, every trade-off you make under pressure.
If your revenue depends on keeping users stuck, you will consciously or not build features that keep them stuck. If your revenue is independent of how quickly users find what they came for, you’re free to build something that actually works.
That freedom is what I was really building when I built Agilis. Not just a dating app. A product that’s structurally on the user’s side.
In an industry optimised for retention over results, that turned out to be the most contrarian thing I could do. It also turned out to be the right thing.
Author Bio:
Jehan Rajendra is the founder of Agilis Dating, a London-based technology company. Agilis is available on iOS and Android worldwide at agilis.dating.
