Privacy-conscious gay dating apps want to dethrone Grindr

you can argue, People have learned that the best gay dating apps are now optimized for monetization and engaging engagement rings. Bots are increasingly overtaken, sometimes even devoid of actual contact.

Grindr, with 15 million monthly active users, is drowning in ads while pushing expensive upsells on users. (In February, as part of the gAI overhaul, the company announced a new $500 monthly premium subscription tier.) Sniffies was a darling of cruisers until April’s seismic reaction to Match Group’s $100 million investment raised concerns that another exotic space could be absorbed into a larger dating conglomerate.

As public backlash against popular queer apps continues to mount, a group of tech entrepreneurs is striving to meet demand by doubling down on privacy-conscious, community-driven alternatives.

Calum Bowden, who posts online as @donjackoghue, launched MeetMarket in March. Currently only available as a web app, MeetMarket includes all the basic features of your typical hookup app – a customizable profile, a network of nearby users – with one key difference. It’s built on a decentralized identity system, which means MeetMarket doesn’t store users’ emails, passwords, or personal information. Users store everything on their devices, giving them full control and ownership of their data and how it is shared. Messages on the platform are end-to-end encrypted, and Bowden says they will always be ad-free, even for non-paying members. (A monthly membership costs €12, or $13.99.)

“Decentralization and data privacy make a lot of sense for LGBT people in general, especially in hostile legal environments or in the US right now, where you don’t really know what digital platforms have your best interest in mind,” says the 34-year-old PhD student in Berlin who studies the sociology of technology and organization.

Within the first 48 hours of MeetMarket’s launch on March 24, more than 12,000 people signed up, and about 60,000 people have used it since then. The app averages 5,000 visitors a week, according to Boden, though there isn’t a lot of simultaneous activity in the same cities. “It’s become more social than just driving an instant relationship.” Casual encounters still happen, he says. “Midwest riders are eating up the meet market,” one user noted on X.

Bowden did not expect public sentiment towards Sniffies to sour just weeks after its release. However, the timing could not have been more than a coincidence. “When Sniffies announced its investment in Match Group, I wondered, ‘How do they light my fire?’” He asks. “This is exactly the model that venture capital leads to. This is exactly why these economic models of technology are so bad, because they basically force the improvement of the digital platform.” Sniffies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A self-described “utopian conspirator,” Bowden is a co-founder of the Trust, a non-profit organization that acts as a kind of incubator for idea models “as a critique of technology and the status quo,” he says. With MeetMarket, he wanted to create an app that gave users more control over their experience without taking away its value.

It can sometimes seem like Big Dating wants people to think it’s the only answer to their romantic woes — Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd recently told Axios that there’s not a lot of longevity on niche apps — but the opposite is proving to be quite true, as people look for more privacy and intention in their online dating experience.

“Gay men have tribes, subcultures, aesthetics, and different ways they want to be perceived,” says Justin Finnegan, a 35-year-old software engineer in Toronto, who last year created Chunkr, a gay hookup app that has resonated with bears, cubs, and their admirers even though it is originally for all gay men.