Your Tinder or Hinge Export Got Rejected? Here's Why, and What to Do

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So you finally got the email, downloaded your export, and uploaded it to RizzStats. And it bounced. Or it went through but half your stats look wrong. Neither means your data is broken. It usually means you grabbed the wrong file, or you're running into one of a handful of quirks in how Tinder and Hinge package your history in the first place.

Here's what's actually going on, and how to fix it.

The clock starts before you're ready

Both apps make you wait, then rush you. On Tinder, you request your data from account.tinder.com/data, and the email typically lands within a few days. Once it does, the download link expires 24 hours after it's sent. Miss it, even because it landed in spam, and you're not troubleshooting a bad file. You're resubmitting the request from scratch.

Hinge is slower and a little more forgiving. Requests can take up to 30 days depending on volume, and once the export is ready you get 48 hours to grab it before it's gone. Request it from the app's settings under "Download My Data," not from a browser.

If your upload is failing and you can't remember exactly when you downloaded the file, that's worth checking first. An export that sat on your desktop for weeks is still valid data, but if you're troubleshooting a failed request rather than a failed upload, the timer is the culprit.

Uploading the wrong file inside the zip

This is the most common snag. Tinder's export unzips into a folder with data.json, an index.html you can browse in a plain web page, and a your_photos folder. RizzStats needs the JSON, not the HTML viewer, so if your upload silently does nothing when you drop a file in, check that you're actually pointing it at data.json.

Hinge's export is a folder of separate files: matches.json, user.json, media.json, prompts.json, and a couple of smaller ones. There's no single all-in-one file the way Tinder has, so make sure you're selecting the right one at /upload rather than the whole unzipped folder or a media file.

Why RizzStats might reject the file outright

RizzStats runs a wrong-file guard on Tinder uploads: if a file shows zero usage days and zero matches, it gets rejected rather than silently producing an empty dashboard. That's not a bug, it's the extractor refusing to build a Rizz Score out of nothing. If you're seeing a rejection and you know you've used Tinder for years, it's worth re-downloading, since a corrupted or partial export can look empty even when your account isn't.

Small numbers that look wrong but aren't

A few things are quirks of the export format itself, not upload errors.

• Hinge timestamps run on UTC. Hinge's export doesn't include a timezone, so RizzStats parses everything as UTC for consistency. If your activity timeline shows a match landing a few hours off from when you remember swiping, that's why.
• Hinge has no built-in match ID. RizzStats reconstructs one from the earliest event in each conversation. Extremely rare edge cases (two matches starting in the same second) can occasionally merge, though this is uncommon.
• Reply-time metrics can look sparse. Both Tinder and Hinge exports only include messages you sent, not what the other person sent back. RizzStats can measure your reply rate from that, but a true response-time metric isn't possible from either app's export today.

None of this touches your privacy setup. Whatever file format quirks you hit, your raw export itself never leaves your browser. RizzStats only ever sends the extracted, structured data.

The fast checklist

If an upload isn't working, run through this in order:

1. Did you download data.json (Tinder) or the actual .json files (Hinge), not the HTML viewer or photo folder?
2. Is the file still within its download window, or do you need to resubmit the request?
3. Does the file actually contain usage history, or could it be a near-empty export worth re-requesting?

Ninety percent of failed uploads come down to one of those three. The rest is just the export format being weirder than you'd expect from something as simple as "here's your data."