What Premium Actually Gets You

HOTPOLY is free to use. You can make a profile, browse, match and message without paying anything, and that will stay true. Premium is an optional subscription that adds a handful of things on top. This post lists all of them, with the limits, so you can decide whether it is worth it to you.

Premium is $9.99 a month on hotpoly.org, or $12.99 a month through Google Play in the Android app. The difference is the store's cut. Either way it is one subscription tied to your account, so Premium bought in the app works on the website and the other way round. It renews monthly until you cancel, and you keep it through the end of the period you already paid for.

Here is what it unlocks.

Smart Sort

By default Discover sorts by distance. Smart Sort re-ranks it using signals about profile quality and mutual activity: accuracy ratings on photos and bios, how recently a profile has been collecting Hot votes, and how people have Hot'd, Passed or matched with you before. The idea is to put the people more likely to be a good fit ahead of the people who are merely nearby.

I don't publish the exact weights, but a complete profile with specific interests filled in ranks better. Turn it on from Sort & Filter.

Basically, if someone has a profile that has been rated as accurate by their previous matches, their profile photos are verified by ID, more people have hot'd their photos, they have hot'd your photos, and they have matched you on their side, they would be at the top of your list. When we have more data, we'll use the photos that you Hot to also weight profiles that you'll likely like.

In other words, active, accurate, and complete profiles that have expressed interest in you are at the top of the Smart Sort list.

ID verification and the ID Verified badge

Age verification is free for everyone and is a quick selfie. Premium members can go further and verify a government ID through our verification partner. Passing it puts an ID Verified badge on your profile. People can trust that you are the person in your profile photos.

This one is Premium for a plain reason: a full document check costs me several times what a selfie check does, and I could not offer it to everyone for free. We never see or store your ID document, only the result.

See who Hot'd you

Hot is a vote on a photo. When someone taps 🔥 on one of yours, it shows up in Likes with a thumbnail of the photo they voted on, newest first. Everyone sees that it happened. Premium members see who did it: the name, the age, a clear photo, and a tap to open their profile. Without Premium the voter's photo is blurred and the name is hidden.

The same applies to alerts. When someone marks a photo of yours Hot, Premium members get the alert by name. Everyone else gets "Someone thinks you're hot."

Activity indicators

Premium members see a small dot on every Discover card: green means active in the last day, yellow the last week, gray longer than that. The same last-active label shows on Matches and at the top of a chat. It is there so you can spend your attention on people who are actually around, and so you know whether to expect a reply.

The "Active in the last week" filter

New this week. It is a Discover filter that hides anyone who has not been on HOTPOLY in the past seven days. On a young app that matters: it is the difference between a feed of a hundred profiles and a feed of the thirty who will see your message. Find it under Filters.

A wider search radius

Normally, free members can search up to 25 miles and Premium goes to 50. The cap is enforced on the server, not just in the app, so it is a real limit either way. For now both caps are temporarily lifted to 5,000 miles while the member base is small (see "Search the Whole Country, For Now"), so this is not a Premium difference at the moment; the 25/50 split returns as local areas fill in.

Change your Temporary Location weekly

Temporary Location lets you browse from another US city without revealing where you are. It is free for everyone, but picking a new city is limited to once every 30 days to stop the feature being used to harvest profiles city by city. Premium members can pick a new city once a week. Resetting to home, or going back to the city you just left, is always free and never counts.

What Premium does not do

It does not put you higher in anyone else's feed. It does not let you message people who have not matched with you. It does not remove the Temporary Location cooldown, only shortens it. There are no boosts, no super-likes, no read receipts for sale, and I do not plan to add any. If a feature would make the app worse for the people who do not pay, it is not going in.

Getting a month free

Your Profile has a permanent invite link. If someone joins through it and starts Premium, you both get a month free, delivered by pushing your next charge out a month, so there is nothing to cancel or restart. You can earn up to six months this way. Partner invites from your Polycule page count too.

Cancelling

Web subscriptions cancel from Profile › Premium. Google Play subscriptions cancel from Google Play's subscription settings. In both cases you keep Premium until the end of the paid period, and nothing on your profile changes when it lapses. The Likes you received are still there; you just stop seeing who sent them.