Hey folks, Pratham here.

Welcome back to Paradox Weekly, a Masters' Union newsletter, where we break down the ideas, trends, and contradictions shaping business today.

Shaadi.com was founded by Anupam Mittal in 1996, which makes the platform thirty this year.

If you think about it, it’s pretty straightforward: Shaadi.com profits when users fail. 

The 90% failure rate is the open secret of a freemium model that earns more from people who stay searching than from people who stop.

A successful match is also a churn for them.

So..Why do Indian families keep paying anyway?

People are not stupid at that scale for that long.

Matrimony.com files quarterly statements on the NSE. 

Even as of 2026, 78% of folks don’t find a match on Shaadi.com.

Every Indian family knows somebody whose profile has been live for two years and is still being renewed every six months.

Nobody is being deceived. 

Indian families wouldn’t let money get debited every month unless they were getting something.

So today’s edition is to uncover what they are paying for.

Tinder works because there is only one stakeholder: the same person who opens the app pays for it and deletes it when they're done.

Shaadi.com is built around two stakeholders, and they want different outcomes.

The customer paying for the account is, more often than not, a parent. 

The user logging in is their adult child.

This principal-agent split changes what the 22% number means. It is the percentage of users for whom an optional bonus materialised.

What the parent is buying is social-duty discharge. 

A profile gives a mother something concrete to show her sister. 

The same profile lets a father answer a relative's questions at the next wedding without changing the subject. 

Whatever the child does with the profile afterwards is, in some sense, a separate transaction. 

The parent's deliverable, which is the act of looking, was completed the moment the account went live.

VIPShaadi is the concierge tier Shaadi.com sells to "1.6 LAKH VIPs." 

The tier promises a dedicated consultant who arranges weekly meetings with a discreet curation of suitable matches. 

The marketing is for the parent, the one who wants their family and friends to know their child is being matched at the right level.

A parent who paid for Platinum and watched the child meet nobody still got the only thing the money had bought: visible proof, in front of the family and the neighbours, that they were trying.

Nobody in the transaction was being cheated.

Matrimony.com Ltd reported 10 lakh paid subscribers in FY25, down 7.5% year-on-year, with revenue down 5.3%. Janakiraman, the CEO, blamed long-term industry trends on the earnings call. 

He was right.

What Janakiraman was describing has nothing to do with brand-on-brand competition. 

The pool of profiles is shrinking because family-arranged marriage is slowly losing its grip on urban India.

A separate Livemint survey reported that 69% of Gen Z respondents said they would prefer a love marriage over an arranged one.

Every one of those love marriages is, technically, a defection from the category.

The principal-agent loop in matrimony only works as long as the adult child is still willing to upload a profile.

Urban Indian millennials are finding partners at their offices, on Bumble, through friend groups, or just by living in cities that are six hours from their parents. 

Parents still want to pay, and increasingly find that their children no longer feel they need them to.

Its tagline, "designed to be deleted," is the most direct attack on Shaadi.com's business model anybody has ever written.

It works because the child is downloading it directly, without a parent in the middle.

Shaadi.com for thirty years has been selling participation in a ritual that lets Indian families do what their community expects of them, and it has done so profitably. 

The majority who never found a partner got exactly the deliverable they were paying for. 

The family did its duty and the neighbours saw the effort, which is what the money was buying.

The thing that will eventually kill the matrimony industry is the erosion of the institution it depends on.

Urban Indian children are slowly opting out of the loop entirely. 

They meet partners before the family search begins, or they refuse outright to be uploaded onto a platform their mother controls. 

A parent who is still willing to pay will, in another generation, find they no longer have an adult child willing to participate.

Shaadi.com owes the family that paid for the account the dignity of having tried. 

That product has worked for years but the agent driving it has begun to disappear.

I read every email.

Until next week,
Pratham