In 2013, Tinder broke into the online dating industry with its simple innovation — swipe right if you like the person and left if you don’t. The app made browsing through profiles and decision-making simpler. Thanks to such changes, the global dating app revenue continues to grow today, making the market attractive for startups.
If you think that you are now ready to enter the dating app market, we’re here to convince you otherwise. Did you know that you no longer need to develop a dating app to be a leader in the industry? Chatbots for dating like Zodier make this possible because all users need for it to work is a messenger. There is no need to download a separate mobile app; it’s enough to start a dialogue.
In this article, we will tell you what Zodier is, how it works, and how much it costs to build such a dating bot.
Zodier is a dating chatbot for popular messengers: Telegram, VK Messenger, Viber, and Facebook Messenger. Currently, they are working on the same solutions for LINE and Kik Messenger.
Zodier follows Tinder’s idea of likes and dislikes. Users who indicate mutual likes can start a chat. The distinctive feature of Zodier is that it takes into account the compatibility of users by date of birth.
In January 2021 the bot ranked number one in three categories: Product of the Month, Product of the Week, and Product of the Day by Product Hunt. By May of this year, the startup had attracted 1 million users. The increase in the number of users for the year was 8000%.
Nowadays, the majority of chatbots are very simple. People usually create them as an extra marketing tool for the following purposes:
But Zodier’s developers believe in the potential rise of chatbots instead of separate applications. Since 2016, they started replacing all other digital tools: websites, messengers, web browsers, and even mobile apps.
Their assumption had been confirmed after they built and launched an MVP in Telegram. It gathered 10,000+ users without huge investments in marketing. Developers realized that the app is not the most important thing; rather, it’s where they offer to use it.
Below you can see the advantages of chatbots in comparison to mobile apps:
There is no one right way to find your ideal partner. Even so, it’s possible to simplify the search using an algorithm that analyzes users’ biorhythms. Biorhythms refer to all the phenomena and processes that are repeated periodically throughout the life cycle. It’s like an internal clock that coordinates and synchronizes all your body’s functions.
In human beings, biorhythms are often considered circadian rhythms, i.e., changes that follow a 24-hour cycle, for example, sleeping at night and being active during the day.
There is also another theory which states that human life is also affected by the moment of birth. Such an approach helps to predict when emotional, physical, and intellectual spheres reach their peak points.
When you notice that you and your partner feel emotionally uplifted, you can see if your biorhythms match. Thus, you can schedule mutual activities, deal with crises, and make your relationship enjoyable. You can’t prevent all the possible conflicts. But you can try to predict the likelihood of their occurrence and prepare yourself accordingly.
After all this discussion, you might have decided that you need a person with biorhythms that match yours perfectly. And Zodier is here to help you with that. You don’t need to analyze anything — its algorithm calculates the user’s biorhythms and compares them with other users’ data. In the potential partner’s profile, you will find a compatibility score that indicates the percentage of matching.
The bot offers two levels of compatibility assessment:
Now let’s take a look at the bot’s interface. We won’t show you its interface in various messengers because it is the same. Instead, we are choosing Telegram as an example.
When you open Zodier for the first time, you see a welcome message that asks you to click the “start” button. The second step is setting your language preference. Then you select your gender.
After that, the bot asks you to enter your city in order to display users who are nearby. The next step is to enter your date of birth to let the bot calculate the compatibility score. Then you need to describe yourself in a few words. You can do it now or skip this step.
Finally, the last step is to upload your profile photo. Now you can browse through candidates, indicate likes/dislikes, and send gifts.
Our business analysts calculated how much it costs to develop a chatbot like Zodier. Below you can see what they came up with.
Task |
Effort (man-hours) |
||
Optimistic |
Most likely |
Pessimistic |
|
Development environment setup: | |||
Local web server setup |
2 |
4 |
5 |
Database setup |
4 |
5 |
6 |
Source code repository setup |
2 |
3 |
4 |
Configuring frameworks |
4 |
5 |
6 |
Designing of application architecture: | |||
Designing architecture, sequence diagrams |
8 |
9 |
10 |
Database layer: | |||
Designing, creation of UML model |
6 |
7 |
8 |
Creation of entity tables, indexes, constraints |
4 |
6 |
8 |
Registration / Authorization: | |||
Sign up |
16 |
20 |
24 |
Persistence & Domain logic layer: | |||
Writing entity classes, object-relational mapping using Hibernate annotations, adding server validation for entities’ fields |
16 |
20 |
24 |
Sorting, filtering |
8 |
12 |
16 |
Service layer development |
40 |
60 |
80 |
Geolocation / Localization |
16 |
24 |
32 |
Payments system integration |
32 |
48 |
64 |
Telegram integration |
24 |
32 |
40 |
Bugfixing |
27 |
38 |
49 |
Total Development Efforts |
209 |
293 |
376 |
Predicted Development Efforts (man/hours) |
209 |
293 |
376 |
Project Management |
29 |
41 |
53 |
Quality Assurance (optional) |
26 |
37 |
47 |
Predicted Total Efforts (man/hours) |
265 |
371 |
476 |
Predicted Project Cost |
$9,275 |
$12,985 |
$16,660 |
As you can see, building a dating chatbot like Zodier will cost you $10,000–$17,000. It’s much cheaper than building a Tinder-like app for iOS or Android.
A dating chatbot over a mobile app is the way forward for your business. Chatbots offer a lot of benefits that will both delight your users and be cost-saving for you. They can provide personalized contact in areas where such interaction is expected. Someday we will be talking to bots more often than humans.
It’s up to you to choose when to accept these inevitable changes. But deciding it today can make you one of the industry pioneers. And we at VironIT are here to help you bring your ideas to life.
If you are ready to launch a dating chatbot, contact us at info@vironit.com.