In 2025, friendship-focused apps generated approximately $16 million in U.S. consumer spending and were downloaded 4.3 million times, according to Appfigures estimates reported by TechCrunch. Those numbers are small compared to dating apps, which generate billions. But a market has formed around something people expect to get for free, and in Toronto it is already crowded.
Timeleft runs its Wednesday dinners here. An app called 222 connects people in the city for small-group activities, and Groupvibe matches Torontonians on shared interests. CBC has reported on the companies now offering Torontonians the chance to make new friends for a price, naming 222, Groupvibe and Timeleft among the ones sorting people into groups by personality test.
A strange economy has grown up in the space between money and friendship, and it runs on people getting lonely enough to open their wallets.
Why is paying for friendship still uncomfortable?
We already pay for plenty without embarrassment: personal trainers, therapists, dating apps, meal delivery, cleaning, dog-walking. Nearly every part of daily life has a price on it now, down to assembling the furniture and driving the kids to school. Nobody bats an eye at a therapist's hourly rate or a dating subscription.
But paying someone to help you make friends still triggers a flinch, and behind the flinch is the sense that if you have to pay for friendship, something must be wrong with you.
The stigma is fading anyway. The need is too large and too urgent for embarrassment to survive it.
Dr. Marisa Franco, a psychologist at the University of Maryland and the author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends, argues that the shame around seeking friendship is a modern invention. For most of human history, people were not expected to make friends on their own. Friendship came out of structures: the village, the church, the guild, the extended family. You did not go looking for friends. The architecture of daily life placed you among them.
The twentieth century took those structures apart. Suburbs replaced villages. Cars replaced sidewalks. Television replaced front porches. The internet replaced everything else. As each layer of communal infrastructure fell away, the responsibility for social connection shifted onto the individual. Making friends became a personal project, like fitness or career development, and it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to charge for it.
When adult friendship gets hard, most people assume the fault is theirs. The problem is structural. The conditions that once made friendship effortless, natural and free no longer exist, and the businesses springing up in Toronto and other cities are filling a void that society created and then pretended did not exist.
The big players have noticed. Bumble, which built its empire on dating, relaunched its BFF feature in September 2025. The new version moved away from one-on-one friend matching, which had always felt slightly awkward (swiping right on a potential friend carries a weirdness that swiping right on a potential date does not), and toward group and community-based connection. The redesign acknowledged what the smaller Toronto startups had already figured out: friendship happens in contexts, not in pairs. You become friends with someone by doing something alongside them, repeatedly, until intimacy develops as a side effect of shared experience.
This is why the Timeleft dinner model works. The meal provides the scaffolding, so nobody has to sit through a friendship interview. The friendship builds itself inside the structure, the way ivy climbs a trellis.
The economics of loneliness make the friendship economy close to inevitable. The fitness industry understood decades ago that people would pay for structured access to something they could do for free. You can run outside. You can do push-ups in your living room. But millions of people pay for a gym membership every month because the structure, the community, the accountability and the permission make the difference between intention and action.
The friendship economy runs on the same principle. Making friends is free, in theory. You can go to a park, strike up a conversation and hope for the best. But the activation energy required for that kind of cold-approach socializing is, for most adults, prohibitively high. Timeleft, 222 and Groupvibe, which CBC reported charge either per event or by monthly membership, sell the removal of the first and most terrifying step. That is the whole product, and the friendship is what the customer does afterward, on their own.
There is a question here the market cannot answer. If friendship has become something we purchase, does that change what it is? Is a friendship that begins with a credit card transaction less authentic than one that begins at a university orientation or a neighbourhood barbecue?
Probably not. A dorm room assignment or a seating chart at a first job is arbitrary too. What a friendship becomes depends on what happens after the introduction, far more than on who or what arranged it. That a paid dinner is now one of those arrangements says something about ordinary social life in a large city. Whether it says decline or adaptation depends on where you stand, and it may say both at once.
A growing number of people in Toronto have decided that being embarrassed about wanting friends is lonelier than paying to do something about it.
Culdesac's Toronto directory lists the groups that already meet on a schedule, by type: Toronto run clubs, Toronto book clubs and Toronto hiking and outdoor clubs.