Ablo Coins: What They Cost, What They Bought, and Why Users Complained

Ablo dressed itself as air travel. You tapped to fly, a paper plane crossed a globe, and you landed on a stranger in another country. The translation worked in both directions. For a while, it was free and magical.

Then came the coins.

Coins were the paid currency in Ablo. They sat alongside miles (earned by using the app) and, later, diamonds (for Live streamers). But coins were the gate to almost everything that made the app useful: choosing who you talked to, where you went, and whether you could stay in touch.

What Coins Bought

Coins were not for decoration. They unlocked the features that free users wanted most:

• Choose a continent or gender. Without coins, the app matched you randomly. With coins, you could pick a broad region (not a specific country) or the gender you wanted to talk to.
• Reconnect with a friend. After the first meeting, sending another message or starting a new chat with someone you had added cost coins. This change, introduced in mid-2020, pushed many users to exchange WhatsApp or Instagram handles in their first message.
• Extra flights. Free users got a daily limit of 10 flights. Coins bought more.
• Gifts. You could send virtual gifts to other users, which cost coins.
• Read receipts. Added in December 2021, this feature let you see if someone had read your message. One reviewer reported it cost about $14.

The Price Hikes That Angered Users

Ablo launched in January 2019 with free, unlimited flights. Coins arrived in August 2019 for choosing a continent or gender. At first, prices were modest.

Then the pandemic hit.

In March and April 2020, as lockdowns began, Ablo roughly tripled its coin prices. The continent-plus-gender filter went from 30 to 90 coins. The gender-only filter went from 20 to 60 coins. Users noticed and called out the timing unprompted in reviews.

The pricing was set in euros. That meant users paying in Turkish lira, Russian rubles, or Brazilian reais faced costs that felt much higher relative to their local incomes. Turkish reviewers frequently called the app a "para tuzağı" (money trap).

The Problems That Never Went Away

Charged for matches who left instantly

From August to September 2021, Ablo started charging coins even when the person you matched with left without saying a word. You paid for the connection, got nothing, and lost the coin. This was one of the most complained-about changes.

Rewarded ads that often didn't pay out

Ablo eventually added rewarded ads as a way to earn free coins. But users reported that the ads frequently did not pay out. You watched the ad, and the coins never arrived. This made the free option unreliable and pushed more users toward buying coins or simply leaving.

No way to earn coins without paying

The daily free-coin check-in was removed around July 2021 and replaced with a "free gift" that users called useless. One reviewer wrote that there was "no reason to open the app daily now." After that, the only reliable way to get coins was to buy them, and not everyone had a bank card. Users in West Africa, Latin America, and other regions without easy card access were locked out.

Miles and Diamonds: The Other Currencies

Ablo had two other currencies that were less controversial.

Miles were earned by using the app. You got them for chatting, completing flights, and being active. They unlocked things like hosting a Live stream. Miles could never be bought. This was the one currency that felt fair to users.

Diamonds were introduced in 2022 as a gift currency for Live streamers. If you watched a Live broadcast and wanted to support the streamer, you bought diamonds and sent them as gifts. The streamer could then convert diamonds back into real money. This was a standard monetization model for live-streaming features.

The Subscription: Gold and Plus

Beyond coins, Ablo offered a Gold or Plus subscription. It bundled several paid features into a monthly or yearly fee:

• See who liked you
• Gender and continent filters without spending coins
• Read receipts
• Other perks

The subscription was an attempt to give heavy users a flat-rate option instead of paying per feature. But it did not solve the core complaint: that the app had become paywalled.

What the Numbers Say

Looking at the review data, the pattern is clear. In 2019, when flights were free and coins were new, the average rating was 3.76 stars. By 2022, as more features moved behind paywalls, the average dropped to 3.57 stars, and the share of 1-star reviews rose from 15% to 25%.

The most common complaint in the 1-star reviews was not about bugs or crashes. It was about opaque bans. But right behind that came the paywall complaints: "2019 was free and magical, now everything costs coins."

What Olu Does Differently

Olu takes a different approach. Miles are earned and never bought. Nothing you need to talk to someone costs money. Friends and reconnecting are free. The app works in a browser, nothing to install. If nobody from a country is online, you may meet an AI local, which is always labelled as AI.

The goal is to remove the friction that coins created: the feeling that every useful feature had a price tag.