Instead, how about a different approach: You get say 10 stamps/day. There is no way to purchase them. Any message you receive can be replied to once with no cost. Also, the cost to send to someone is adjusted by the cost to send to you. (Another poster suggested ELO ratings, which makes sense.)
You have a choice between occasionally contacting the hot ones or fairly routinely contacting those at your level or below. It will make people much more realistic in who they choose to contact, taking long shots means not having any shot at the ones you might actually get.
The app should be tied to your identity (although I wouldn't require real name use in the prospect-facing side) so you can't just create a bunch of accounts to get extra stamps.
Isn't that how it normally works out anyway?
I've got a better idea. Have a swiping system, but also have a simple indicator to see how often people respond to messages after first swipe. There could also be an indicator for how long those conversations typically last.
Or you could just make it extremely simple: just have something saying "this person is X% likely to respond after a match."
Or an opaque "conversation score" which is hard to game, but indicates whether or not they're actually talking to their matches. You could categorize them as "great conversationalists!" and then allow people to filter out those who aren't.
Of course, that could be gamed too but it would be better than just matching over and over with people who have no interest in actually talking to you.
Better I would have thought to kick such guys off the platform, raising the level for women, which would in turn make it more appealing for more evolved males.
Every woman who's gone on online dating can give you a list of stories of creepy, scary and/or off-putting experiences.
My point here isn't to start an online debate about gender equality, but to say: one of the main things that would help bring users to an online dating app is making it safer for women. If the women come, the men will follow.
1) Let people set their own price. Then it's not the platform valuing you, it's how much you value your own time.
2) Provide "auto-pricing" as an optional feature. Use an imaginary unit - call it "stamps" and provide ways to earn "stamps" on the platform besides just buying them.
"How many stamps should it cost for somebody to send you a letter? Or you can use one of our auto-managers - do you want to receive lots of letters or only a few?"
You could still have some kind of invisible credit score under the hood even for users that don't use the auto-pricer - people with good credit get plentiful free stamps.
Then you'd have to get into a whole Google-style graph-based-ranking but for people, which I assume sites like Twitter are already doing under the hood.
Of course, the problem here is that you'd have a plethora of alts to farm free stamps, which would clutter the search list...
Everything is hard.