Dating business due-diligence checklist

Whether you are preparing to sell, evaluating an acquisition, or raising, these are the areas a serious counterparty will examine. The recurring lesson: buyers and investors rebuild your numbers from raw data rather than trusting the slide, so honesty and cleanliness here directly affect both the price and the certainty of closing.

Financials and unit economics

• Revenue by stream (subscription versus a la carte), gross and net of fees and disputes.
• Churn calculated on payers, not all users, with the method shown.
• CAC including the incentives and attribution often quietly dropped.
• Net LTV to CAC by cohort, after refunds, fees, and disputes.
• The gap between gross and net revenue, where optimistic models hide.

Liquidity and engagement

• Cohort retention curves, by market and by side of the marketplace.
• Marketplace balance and how it is maintained across geographies.
• Experience metrics: match rate, reply rate, time to first match.
• Concentration risk: how much depends on one city, channel, or cohort.

Trust, safety, and disputes

• Dispute and refund rates against card-network thresholds.
• Moderation systems, romance-scam and fraud controls, and incident history.
• Identity, liveness, and age-assurance coverage.

Compliance and legal

• Age-assurance and platform-safety compliance by jurisdiction.
• Data protection and privacy posture.
• Terms, billing, and cancellation practices, and any regulatory correspondence.

Technology and operations

• Platform ownership: built, bought, or white-label, and the terms behind it.
• App store standing and any history of rejections or warnings.
• Key dependencies and single points of failure.

Team and disclosures

• Who actually runs each function and what is outsourced.
• Any dual roles or conflicts (for example an advisor who is also a buyer), disclosed.

Related reading

Use this with the guide on dating app unit economics and the dating operator benchmarks report.