These Privacy-Conscious Gay Dating Apps Want to Dethrone Grindr

You could argue, and people have, that the top gay dating apps are now optimized for monetization and juicing engagement loops. Increasingly overrun with bots, they are at times even devoid of actual connection.

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

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

Calum Bowden, who posts under the internet persona @donjackoghue, launched MeetMarket in March. Currently only available as a web app, MeetMarket includes all the core features of your typical hookup app—a customizable profile, a grid of nearby users—with one major difference. It was built on a decentralized identity system, meaning MeetMarket doesn’t store users’ emails, passwords, or personal information. Users store everything on their device, giving them full control and ownership over their data and how it’s shared. Messages on the platform are end-to-end encrypted, and Bowden says it will always be ad-free, even for nonpaying members. (A monthly membership costs €12, or $13.99.)

“Decentralization and data privacy make a lot of sense for queer people in general, and especially in hostile legal environments or in the US right now, where you don’t really know what digital platforms actually 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, over 12,000 people had signed up, and some 60,000 people have used it since. The app averages 5,000 weekly visitors, according to Bowden, though there is not a lot of concurrent activity in the same cities. “It’s become more social than necessarily driving an immediate hookup.” But casual encounters do still happen, he says. “The Midwest bottom jockeys are eating meet market up,” one user noted on X.

Bowden didn’t anticipate public sentiment would sour on Sniffies just a few weeks after his launch. Still, the timing of it couldn’t have been more serendipitous. “When Sniffies announced their investment from Match Group, I was like, how are they fueling my fire?” he asks. “This is exactly the model that venture capital leads to. This is exactly why these economic models for technology are so bad, because they basically force the gentrification of a digital platform.” Sniffies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A self-described “utopian conspirator,” Bowden is the cofounder of Trust, a nonprofit that operates as a kind of incubator to prototype ideas “as a critique of technology and the status quo,” he says. With MeetMarket, he wanted to create an app that gave users more agency over their experience without cheapening it.

It can sometimes seem like Big Dating wants people to believe that it is the only answer to cure their romantic woes—Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd recently told Axios that there isn’t much longevity in niche apps—but the opposite is proving just as true, as people seek out more specificity and intention in their online dating experience.

“Gay men have tribes, subcultures, aesthetics, and different ways they want to be seen,” 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, chubs, cubs, and their admirers despite originally being for all gay men.

Chunkr, which currently is only available on iOS, combines nearby profiles, a map, hot spots, and events, so people can understand what is happening around them. There is no ad-tracking layer, and Chunkr’s listing in Apple’s App Store contains a privacy disclosure that states the developer does not collect any data from the app.

Finnegan acknowledges that Grindr is powerful because of the network effect; everyone is there because so many people use it. But his main issue with the app is that it treats gay dating as a single market instead of one that is also defined by niche, interest-driven groups. He is also building Rush, a sister product to Chunkr meant to reach men who may not immediately see themselves in Chunkr’s bear community. Meanwhile, Streakr, which debuted less than a month ago as an app for gay and straight daters, has been warmly welcomed by the people who are testing it.

Unlike Grindr, which Bowden calls “a hegemonic force in gay life that all of my social scene despises using,” he’s focused on preserving the user experience while also scaling the app. Corporate-controlled apps have a fiduciary obligation to make money for shareholders—“not to make gay people have a better life,” Bowden says—and that often means users are deprioritized in favor of financial growth, often through increased ads and pay-gating basic features.

In a statement to WIRED, a spokesperson for Grindr acknowledged that according to user feedback “the experience hasn’t always felt balanced, and we’ve acted on it: rolling out recent changes to reduce interruptions for free users.” The company added that improvements are ongoing as new apps enter the space and that it welcomes competition.

When thinking about how MeetMarket could operate, Bowden studied ​​different economic models and was drawn to the platform-cooperative movement, which is all about digital platforms being communally owned and managed by the people who use them. “I don’t necessarily want the people who buy shares like a co-op to get rich because the thing does well. I’d rather create wealth in a more social way,” he says.

Bowden is in the process of setting up MeetMarket with steward ownership, a model that gives users veto rights over key strategic, content, or data decisions. Under steward ownership, the app’s business is split three ways: users, or stewards, are allocated voting shares. Investors are given economic shares but have no voting rights. And a separate foundation with an independent interest in making sure MeetMarket never goes against its principles is given a golden share, allowing it veto power over any attempt to sell MeetMarket or alter its principles. In 2022, outdoor clothing brand Patagonia restructured into a steward ownership model, splitting the company’s control between two separate entities with all of its profits used to fight the climate crisis.

Bowden has launched a crowdfunding campaign where users have the opportunity to become founding members, starting at €60 ($69) for an annual membership or €225 ($262) for lifetime access. Founding members get a say in what features MeetMarket creates next and how its fund is allocated.

“There’s such a long history of incredible forms of mutual aid within the queer community. It’s surprising to me that we haven’t inherited that from the previous generation with tech that actually is in our interest,” Bowden says.