The Real Cost of Making a New Friend

A running club is free to join. But you need shoes, and better shoes if your knees complain, and a way to get to the meeting point that isn’t a $30 rideshare. A pottery class runs £15 to £40 a session. A dinner with strangers, matched by an app, is rarely under $25 once you count the meal. None of these numbers show up when someone tells you to “just get out more.” But they are the actual reason a lot of people don’t.

This matters because the cheap, unplanned version of socializing has mostly disappeared. Ray Oldenburg’s idea of the third place — the café, the barbershop, the corner bar where you show up and someone you know is probably there — depended on places that didn’t charge a cover for showing up. A 2025 study in Health & Place tracked twelve categories of these spaces, from libraries to recreation centers to diners, and found closures across every single category between 2019 and 2021. The University of Colorado Boulder researchers who summarized that work made a point of naming what closed: senior centers, churches, the low-cost anchors that didn’t ask you to spend to belong. What’s left, increasingly, is the paid version.

Free things aren’t actually free

Libraries and parks are still free to enter. But most of what fills a calendar with recurring social contact now has a price tag attached, because it’s been rebuilt around consumption. Meetup, still one of the largest platforms for interest-based groups with tens of millions of members, is free at the point of joining a group — but many of the groups themselves meet at breweries, climbing gyms, or paid classes, because that’s what a venue needs to justify hosting a recurring group of strangers.

Timeleft, which seats strangers at weekly dinners matched by personality, is explicit about this: the connection happens over a meal you’re paying for, at a restaurant, every week if you keep going. Buffet, the app that launched in Los Angeles matching a person with another person and a venue based on interests and a short personality questionnaire, sits in the same category — the meeting point is usually somewhere you spend money once you’re there, even if the match itself is free. None of this is a design flaw. A shared activity gives strangers something to do with their hands and eyes so the silences aren’t excruciating. That’s real, and it’s part of why these formats work better than “let’s just talk.” But the shared activity almost always costs something.

Who this actually filters out

The people most likely to be priced out of rebuilding a social life are often the people who need it most. Eric Klinenberg’s research on social infrastructure makes the point that the design of shared space, not just its existence, determines who uses it — a library reading room welcomes someone with no money to spend in a way a wine bar’s trivia night does not. And a 2024 KFF survey found that loneliness and social support vary sharply by race and by experience of discrimination, which tracks closely with income. Money isn’t the only barrier here, but it stacks on top of the others rather than standing apart from them.

Cigna’s 2025 survey found 57% of Americans report loneliness, and that workers report it too — 52% of them. Work is where a lot of adult social contact used to happen by default, through the water cooler and the shared lunch break, none of which required a separate spending decision. As that default has weakened, what’s replaced it tends to be scheduled, ticketed, and optional in a way that makes it easy to skip when money’s tight that month — which is exactly when isolation does the most damage.

What actually costs nothing

The honest version of this article doesn’t end with “there are free options too, don’t worry.” Some things genuinely are close to free, and they’re worth naming specifically rather than gesturing at.

Public libraries increasingly run book clubs, game nights, and skill-shares with no fee and no purchase expected once you’re there — check a specific branch’s calendar rather than assuming. Parks host free pickup sports and, in many cities, free fitness classes in summer. A run club, once you own shoes, costs nothing per session — most just meet at a set time and go. Community boards like Nextdoor sometimes surface genuinely free local meetups that never make it onto a paid platform, because they don’t need to.

The harder truth is that these free options usually require more of your own initiative than a paid app does. Nobody is matching you with a group or texting you a reminder. You have to find the library’s calendar, show up the first time without knowing anyone, and come back a second time even though the first time felt awkward. Paid platforms often exist specifically to remove that friction — the algorithm does the matching, the app sends the nudge — and that convenience is a real thing you’re buying, not a scam.

The point isn’t that spending money on socializing is wrong. It’s that treating it as a neutral, universal expectation — “just sign up for something” — quietly writes off anyone for whom $30 a week isn’t a rounding error. If you’re rebuilding a social life on a tight budget, start with the library calendar and the free run club before the app subscription, not because the app is bad, but because it shouldn’t be the only door.