Would You Pay £20 a Month for an Algorithm to Pick Your Friends?

Would you pay £20 a month for the chance of making a friend, on the understanding that an algorithm — not you — decides who you meet?

Paid social events are increasingly in vogue, driven by the decline of third spaces such as youth centres and pubs, the growth of remote working, and rising loneliness. According to the Office for National Statistics, 40% of adults aged 16 to 29 feel lonely always, often or some of the time.

The pitch

"There hasn't been anything that feels authentic to helping people meet people," says Nicola Gunby, a co-founder of Cliq, an online platform and app that aims "to bring people together through shared interests and real-world experiences."

The observation underlying the business is that the first place people in their twenties and thirties turn to when trying to make friends is a social network built for maintaining existing relationships rather than forming new ones.

These platforms typically charge anything from nothing at all to £20 a month.

Paid social clubs are spreading across UK cities, typically charging between nothing and £20 a month. Photograph: Caia Image/Getty Images

What is actually being sold

The algorithm gets the attention, but it is probably the least important part of the product.

What these services provide is a scheduled event, in a specific place, at a specific time, with a group of strangers who have all paid to be there. The payment is doing most of the work: it filters for people serious enough to spend money, and it creates a commitment that makes attendance likely.

That is a description of what a club, a church or an evening class used to do without software. The novelty is not the matching; it is that the organising function has been rebuilt as a paid service after the free institutions that performed it closed.

The uncomfortable economics

There is a distributional point buried in this that the coverage tends to skip.

Third spaces were, by definition, cheap or free and open to anyone. A youth centre did not means-test attendance. Replacing them with subscription platforms reconstitutes the function while restricting access to people who can afford £20 a month — which is to say, not the people for whom the loss of free social infrastructure has been most damaging.

Whether it works

On the narrow question, the format has something going for it. Friendship formation is well understood to depend on repeated unplanned contact with the same people over time, which is why it happens so readily at school and so rarely afterwards.

A recurring event with a stable group approximates that condition deliberately. Whether an algorithm improves the composition of the group, or simply provides a reason to trust that it was composed at all, is a question the companies are unlikely to be able to answer — and that their customers may not need answered.

What the operators are quietly optimising for

A subscription business built on introductions faces an awkward incentive: a customer who successfully makes friends stops paying.

That does not mean anyone is deliberately withholding results, and the better platforms address it by selling access to a continuing programme of events rather than to outcomes. But it is a structural tension worth naming, and it is the same one that shapes dating apps — an industry that has spent two decades being accused of monetising the search rather than the finding.

The measurement gap

None of these services publishes anything meaningful about whether friendships actually form and persist.

Attendance, satisfaction scores and retention are all easy to report and all measure engagement rather than success. The number that would matter — how many members still know someone from the platform a year later — is difficult to collect and unappealing to publish. Until someone does, the claim that the model works rests entirely on how the evenings feel at the time.