Short version: free to download, $0.99 a month to use, $2.99 for the version with extras, and free for good if you join before launch.
Because the alternatives are worse. An app funded by advertising is paid to hold your attention, which means it profits from your loneliness lasting a bit longer. An app funded by selling data has to collect it first, which is incompatible with the whole point of this one.
A dollar a month is roughly what it takes to run the servers and keep the thing alive, and it means the app can be designed to get you off it.
No advertising, no analytics, no tracking, nothing sold or shared. Not as a promise about our intentions. There is no third party service inside the app that could receive any of it.
The terms of use set all of this out in section 14.
There is nothing to buy that gets you seen more than somebody else. No boosts, no priority placement, no paying to jump a queue. Those mechanics make an app money by making the free experience worse, and once you have built that you cannot stop.
Free to download with a usable free tier. Kindred is $0.99 a month with the first month free, and Kindred+ is $2.99 a month. Anyone who joins the launch list before release keeps Kindred free permanently and gets three months of Kindred+.
No. There is no advertising, no analytics and no tracking anywhere in the app, and nothing is sold or shared. The subscription exists precisely so that none of those are needed.
Through your App Store or Google Play subscription settings, since Apple and Google do the billing rather than Kindred. Cancelling stops the next charge and you keep the paid features until the current period ends.
No. There are no boosts and no priority placement of any kind. Those mechanics work by making the ordinary experience worse, which is not a business we want to be in.
Everyone on the launch list gets Kindred free permanently, three months of Kindred+ on the house, and Kindred+ at $0.99 after that instead of $2.99.
Kindred does not run background checks and does not verify that anyone is who they say they are. No app does, whatever it implies. Meet somewhere public the first few times, tell someone where you are going, sort out your own way home, and never send anyone money. The safety section is honest about exactly what we do and what we cannot do.