Is Grindr Dead?

What is Grindr supposed to be?

I’m not sure if this existential question is one that keeps anyone up at night, but with the recent announcement that the hookup app is rolling out EDGE, a $500 per month plan powered by “gAI” (pronounced gay-eye) technology, it’s an inquiry that came to my mind. I had a few more, too.

Has arranging sex become so complicated that robot assistance is now needed? At $500 per month, wouldn’t hiring a sex worker be more economical and more climate conscious? Have computer scientists researched what happens when you feed an artificial intelligence a steady stream of horny chats?

Perhaps the most important question: Do the people who run Grindr know what Grindr is?

The introduction of AI feels unnecessarily complicated, throwing more technology and friction onto a platform that’s supposed to be direct. According to users I spoke to, it feels like one more thing that the company is working on instead of making the app more user friendly. For a company that made hooking up so efficient and easy, something about its current form feels exhausting.

The collective dissatisfaction coupled with the rise of newer, more direct hookup apps might be the death knell for Grindr. But there’s also something anchoring this fatigue: Beneath the sticker shock and that gay-eye pun is a deeper story of what happens when gay culture becomes comfortably mainstream and what it means to be on Grindr in a world where so many people don’t think they need it anymore.

For an app that’s supposed to be sexy and fun, a lot of the conversation surrounding Grindr is decidedly not sexy or fun. The way many users talk about it comes from a place of frustration and even embarrassment for using the app at all.

Over the past few years, Grindr users have complained it’s become simultaneously more unusable and more expensive. To the people who have used it for nearly a decade, it’s a clear example of what’s known as “enshittifcation,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the phenomenon in which businesses degrade their product to maximize profit. Enshittification is good for business and for executives, but bad for users.

Ryan, a former marketing employee who left in 2023, says the turning point happened in 2022, when Grindr had its IPO. (Ryan asked for anonymity to be able to speak freely about his time at the company. Meanwhile, most of the other men I interviewed for this piece were given pseudonyms to be able to speak frankly about their sex lives.)

After the company went public, Ryan says, the focus shifted from Grindr’s users to its investors. New CEO George Arison had a vision for the company that was more aligned with a burgeoning tech company (e.g. an obsession with AI) than it did an irreverent queer startup.

“Grindr really changed the game in a lot of ways; it was a different type of cruising,” Ryan said, explaining the app’s subversive roots. “It was, at the time, so cool and inventive, but now, it’s taken on a Silicon Valley shape.”

I asked AJ Balance, Grindr’s Chief Product Officer, about the criticism that Grindr has strayed from its core mission of making hooking up easier. He said that the hookups are just one segment of the app, and that the company is interested in building other segments. “Some of the principles we have in building our products is giving users choice…and control over what products they want to use,” Balance told Vox. “If users don’t want to engage [with these products], they don’t have to go there. They can also opt out of these features if they don’t want to participate at all.”

To hear Grindr users tell it, the current direction isn’t resonating with the people simply using Grindr as god intended: to get laid.

“There’s a kind of feedback loop,” Jack, 46, told Vox. “It gets sh*tty. More people leave because it’s sh*tty, and they [Grindr] have to make it even sh*ttier for the remaining users in order to mid-max for revenue, not for user experience.”

Jack originally downloaded Grindr back in 2009, when he got his first iPhone and around the same time that he moved to New York City, where he currently lives. That version was free and allowed users to browse 100 profiles. At the time, you could spend $2.99 per month on an ad-free version that doubled the number of accounts you could look at. Jack said his peak usage was from around 2009 to about 2012, and he fully stopped using the app in 2022 — the same year that Ryan, the former employee, also says was the turning point.

According to Jack (as well as other current/former Grindr users I spoke to), the app’s sh*ttiness comes in two main forms: ads and bots.

Seemingly, every time you tap within the app — whether you’re opening a message, receiving a photo, loading more profiles, etc. — you’ll be hit with an ad that interrupts the action. For a service that’s supposed to promptly connect excited users to each other, it does its fair share of cockblocking. It’s made worse by the content of some of the ads, which can be pretty unhinge. They may involve a game where you save a baby or puppy from lava or ask you to comfort a bald, pregnant woman enduring a miserable life.

Meanwhile, bots are fake profiles that send spam messages to users, often linking to third-party websites or asking for credit card information. Because they’re so prevalent, and some are attempting to do legit crimes, Grindr has a “Scam Awareness Guide” instructing users on how not to get phished. While a knowledgeable Grindr user may not ever fall for a bot, these fake profiles still take up space on grids; can count against the total number of profiles you can view; and can inundate your inbox with messages and taps (similar to sending someone an emoji reaction on an Instagram), triggering rounds and rounds of pointless notifications.

According to Balance, the company takes both ads and bots seriously and is looking to “continue to improve the ad experience.” He said that complaints with the ad experience may have to do with Grindr’s privacy concerns.

“We actually serve ads with the least possible amount of information to share with advertisers because of that,” Balance said. “And so we don’t share personal information beyond IP address and advertiser identifier with user consent. As a result, our ads are less personalized and targeted.”)

Want to make these annoyances go away? For now, you’ll need to start looking into Grindr’s paid model.

That initial $2.99/month price is long gone. Instead, users have the choice between two paid tiers: Xtra and Unlimited. Xtra removes the ads and unlocks the 500 profiles nearest in proximity. Unlimited, the more expensive option, unlocks all the profiles along with additional features, like being able to send photos that disappear after they’re opened. The pricing is roughly $15 per week or $150 to $300 per year (there’s a slight discount for paying up front, and Grindr offers sporadic sales). According to Balance, there are roughly 15 million active users and 1.2 million users who pay for some kind of premium version of the app.

A core tenet of enshittification is that the user pain points aren’t bugs but features. The worse a free experience, the more people will pay to avoid it or to restore it to its original use. In this model, there isn’t any incentive to make things better, because that isn’t what makes money.

As Grindr’s user experience has changed, the culture it helped mainstream changed, too — maybe to the point where Grindr has become obsolete.

Brian Moylan, a culture writer, told Vox that Grindr’s trajectory from novelty, to the apex hookup app, to another player in a crowded field isn’t that surprising; he’s seen it happen before. Prior to Grindr, gay guys were on websites like Manhunt and in Gay.com chatrooms. Grindr disrupted those platforms by offering something location-based and conveniently accessible by smartphone.

Moylan, 47, believes that the Grindr audience seeking out hookups who are annoyed by the app’s declining usability have moved to Sniffies, a competitor that launched in 2018 and that puts more direct emphasis on hookups and public sex. Though Sniffies has a paid version ($19.99 per month, with a discount if you pay for three or six months at a time), the basic features are available to users, and the ads in the free version are minimal and easy to click out of.

“People are fed up with the apps in general, not just Grindr, and want more real life experiences,” Moylan said. “That’s why you’re getting this rise of Sniffies, which is making it more like how cruising used to be. It’s also about glory holes, and groups, and anonymity.”

Sniffies’s more subversive, sex-forward attitude is also more in line with how gay hookup culture has changed. Moylan says that innovations like PrEP and more general knowledge about safer sex has given queer men more sexual freedom — which includes freedom to explore the kind of kinks and fetishes that Apple’s app store restricts but Sniffies caters to. (Sniffies is primarily web-based; the company officially launched an app for iOS in 2025, but it was pulled because of restrictions on adult content.) That newfound freedom coincided with Americans’ increasingly open attitudes about being LGBTQ+. (Remember: Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, was still many years away when Grindr launched.)

When Grindr debuted in 2009, it made hooking up with other men extremely easy. All you ostensibly needed were (at least) two men who had the app. But as LGBTQ+ culture, and specifically gay men’s hookup culture, becomes more mainstream and socially acceptable, that connection isn’t inherent or exclusive to Grindr.

“It’s just like when you realize you don’t need Grindr to hook up, there’s no reason to go back to Grindr,” Phil, a 29-year-old, told me. Phil first used the app when he graduated in college in 2018 but stopped after moving to the South a year later. Now, he and his husband find social media to be more effective and efficient than any gay-specific dating apps. “I don’t need to get on Grindr to find somebody that I want to hook up with,” he said. “I already know that because we’ve been in each other’s DMs on Instagram or Twitter.”

“It’s so much easier to find a gay guy now,” Moylan said. “Now, you go on a hot guy’s Instagram, and there’s a rainbow flag in the bio, and like, ‘Oh, okay, I can message you.’”

Perhaps it’s a sign of progress that we no longer need a specific gay hookup app to orchestrate a gay hookup.

Meanwhile, Grindr itself has also become mainstream, cementing its place in pop culture. The app has been the subject of late night sketches. Sabrina Carpenter sampled its distinct notification sounds. It’s the punchline in jokes about its own ubiquity. There’s also the shopworn trope or gimmick that the people who use Grindr the most are the ones — Republicans, religious figures, etc. — most hostile to gay men.

All of that universality sands away some of its appeal. Shouldn’t Grindr, a platform that’s about hookups and sex, have some kind of edge to it? Why would gay guys want to be on a site that so many straight people know about?

The men I spoke to for this article did note that, even though they personally have outgrown Grindr, it still serves a purpose: It’s likely to be more valuable in small towns, for example, where LGBTQ+ culture might not be as accessible. It also allows younger queer people and men who are in the closet to explore their sexuality. For those users, Grindr is easier to find and more accessible (e.g. on Apple’s app store) compared to a site like Sniffies, and it has a bigger user base to connect with.

Grindr’s cultural presence as an app that isn’t primarily for hookups feels in line with what the company envisions. Balance, the Grindr Chief Product Officer, used the term “gayborhood” multiple times in his conversation with me, explaining that he sees Grindr as more of a community than a hookup space.

“We think the gayborhood concept is a good metaphor for it. Within the neighborhood there are places and spaces for the more hookup or casual encounter-forward aspects of gay life and there are places and spaces for dates and friends and travel,” Balance said, noting that the AI assistant would probably be more inclined for the latter, because it could streamline and organize those recommendations.

In a sense, the community vision might be in line with how Grindr’s users now see it. Many of the men I spoke to said Grindr’s most useful quality is that it makes traveling easier. In those instances, they don’t necessarily use the app for sex, but to connect and ask people for recommendations about which bars to go to, good restaurants to try, and what parties are happening — essentially a social media app.

“I have it because when I go to a new city or I travel or something, it’s nice to see who’s around. But I wouldn’t say that I use it as often,” Ryan, the former Grindr employee, told me. But he said that, while helpful, asking gay guys where to eat and what bars to go to isn’t what it was made to do and what it should be.

I ask what it should be.

“Helping gay guys f*ck faster.”