How to read a dating company's 10-K (without a finance degree)

A 10-K is a company's annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and it is the most honest document a public dating app will ever produce — because lying in it is a federal offense. You don't need to read all 200 pages or know accounting. You need to know which four sections matter and how to read one number. This walks through both, using the real FY2025 filings from Match Group, Bumble and Grindr.

What a 10-K is, and where to find it

Every company listed on a US exchange must file a 10-K once a year. It's free, public, and lives on the SEC's EDGAR system at sec.gov — no login, no paywall. Search the company name or its ticker and open the document filed as Form 10-K:

• Match Group — ticker MTCH (Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish and ~13 others)
• Bumble Inc. — ticker BMBL (Bumble, Badoo, Fruitz)
• Grindr Inc. — ticker GRND (Grindr)

Note who's not there: a 10-K only exists for public companies. Coffee Meets Bagel, Feeld, Muzz and most niche apps are private and file nothing — which is exactly why a standing, primary-source reference has to lean on the public players. (We map the whole field, public and private, on who owns what.)

The four sections that matter

A 10-K has a fixed structure, which is the good news — the part you want is always in the same place.

Item 1 — Business. What the company actually owns and how it's organized. This is where Match Group lists its four reporting segments (Tinder, Hinge, Evergreen & Emerging, Match Group Asia) and where you confirm which brands sit under which parent. Read it once to get the map.

Item 1A — Risk Factors. The most candid section in the entire document. Companies are legally required to disclose what could go wrong, so they write down — in plain language — the things their marketing never would. This is where the real story usually is.

Item 7 — MD&A (Management's Discussion & Analysis). Management explaining the numbers in words: what revenue did, segment by segment, and why. This is where you find the direction of travel.

Item 8 — Financial Statements. The audited numbers themselves — revenue, net income, the balance sheet. Audited means an outside accounting firm signed off, which is why these figures carry more weight than anything in a press release.

The risk factors are where companies tell the truth

Start with Item 1A, because it's the section that pays off fastest. Here is Match Group, in its FY2025 10-K, describing its own core dependency:

That single sentence is the entire business model stated as a fear. And note: the exact "retain / add / convert to paying users" wording also appears, verbatim, in Bumble's and Grindr's 10-Ks — which tells you this pressure is structural to the category, not specific to one company.

Then there's the most revealing line in any of the filings — Match Group admitting that helping users succeed can cost it money:

When you can read a company say, in a federal filing, that better outcomes for users may reduce its revenue — you understand the tension behind every paywall in the app. That's the value of the risk factors: they're the one place the incentive conflict is written down.

Reading the revenue line: the one mechanic to learn

Open the MD&A (Item 7) and you'll see revenue broken into segments. Here is Match Group's, straight from the FY2025 filing:

The total barely moved — but three of five segments shrank. How? This is the one mechanic worth learning, and it's hidden in two numbers the MD&A always reports together:

Once you've read that pattern once, you'll see it everywhere in the sector. We unpack it in full in how dating apps grow revenue while losing users.

The trap: net income vs. operating reality

Here's where a 10-K can mislead you if you only read the bottom line. Compare the three public players:

Bumble's −$693.1M net loss looks catastrophic next to Grindr's tidy profit. But read the footnote:

The other thing that table reveals — note the marketing column — is how a network's strength shows up in the filing. Grindr spends ~2.6% of revenue on marketing and still grows +28%; Match and Bumble spend ~17–18%. A sticky niche network needs almost no paid acquisition, and the 10-K is where that becomes a number instead of a guess.

What the filing will not tell you

Reading filings well also means knowing where they go quiet — so you never invent a figure to fill the gap:

• Subscription vs. à-la-carte split. Match reports one "Direct Revenue" line. It does not break out how much comes from subscriptions versus one-off purchases (boosts, super-likes). Any "X% of revenue is subscriptions" claim cannot be sourced to the filing.
• Cost to acquire one user. Filings disclose total selling & marketing expense, never a per-user acquisition cost. A "$Y to acquire a customer" figure isn't in there.
• Market capitalization. Not in the 10-K at all. Market cap is secondary-market data that moves every day; it's a separate, dated data point — not something the company "reported."

Try it yourself

You now have everything you need to open a real one:

1. Go to the SEC filings page and click through to Match Group's FY2025 10-K on EDGAR.
2. Jump to Item 1A and find the "retain / add / convert to paying users" sentence.
3. Jump to Item 7 and find Tinder's revenue line and the payers / RPP figures.
4. Check the net income — and ask whether any big swing is operating or a one-time write-down.

That's the whole method. Four sections, one mechanic, and a healthy suspicion of the bottom line.

The takeaway

A 10-K isn't written for you, but it's available to you, and it's the only document where a dating company has to state its risks honestly and have its numbers audited. Learn to find the risk factors, read the revenue-per-payer mechanic, and look past net income to operating reality — and you can know more about how these apps actually make money than almost anyone reviewing them. Start with the filings themselves; we keep them current here so you don't have to hunt.