The 2026 squeeze: why dating apps are rebuilding

1. Fewer people are paying

The second quarter of 2026 confirmed what dating companies have felt for two years. Bumble Inc had 3.16 million paying members, down 16% on a year earlier, after a 21% fall in the first quarter. Match Group had 13.3 million payers, down 6%. Tinder, the biggest app in the world, had 8.5 million, down 5%.

Paying members, change from a year earlier

April to June 2026

Bumble Inc−16.4%

Match Group−6%

Tinder−5%

Hinge+17%

−20%0+20%

Sources: Bumble and Match Group second quarter 2026 results.

Hinge is the exception. Its payers grew 17% and revenue 22%. That matters, because it shows people still pay for dating when the product feels modern and works well. The problem isn’t demand. It’s what most apps are able to ship.

2. Growth costs twice what it did

Adjust’s 2026 report found that the average cost of a dating app install rose from $1.46 in 2024 to $2.76 in 2025, while installs fell 4% and sessions fell 7%. AppsFlyer found that 69% of dating app installs were deleted within a month.

The cost of getting noticed

Dating apps, worldwide, 2024 against 2025

Install, 2024$1.46

Install, 2025$2.76

1,000 ad views, 2024$4.37

1,000 ad views, 2025$8.57

Source: Adjust, State of dating apps 2026.

Apps have reacted in opposite ways. Bumble cut performance marketing by “well over 80%” and its first half sales and marketing spend fell 39%. Match is moving nearly $600m of marketing under one central team and raising Tinder’s budget. Either way, money spent finding members is money not spent on the product they arrive in.

3. The platform problem

The clearest sign of the squeeze is what executives now say about their own technology. Bumble’s chief executive told investors in March 2026: “We cannot deliver the innovations we are creating on our legacy tech stack.” In May she spoke of “extraordinary tech debt”. In August she said that on the old recommendation system, “it could have taken us months to make very marginal changes.”

Bumble’s finance chief said the company still runs “from these very old data centers”, and that moving to the cloud would make operating costs “substantially lower”. The relaunch on the new platform has moved from the second quarter of 2026, to the fourth, to “very early 2027”. Product development spending rose from 10% to 15% of revenue while it happens.

On 13 October 2026 Bumble agreed to be taken private by Ithaca Holdings for about $1.3bn, with a stated mission “to apply frontier technology to renew and accelerate businesses”. It was valued at around $14bn when it listed in 2021.

Bumble has the money and the people to rebuild. Most dating companies don’t.

4. The portfolio problem

Groups that grew by buying brands now run many apps on many stacks. ParshipMeet Group, owner of The Meet Group’s MeetMe, Skout and Tagged as well as eharmony and Parship, saw its dating and video revenue fall 24% in 2025, from €375m to €285m. The video apps fell 31%. Its owner wrote down €386m of goodwill in 2024, citing “changes in user behavior”, and told investors in 2025 it had “full focus on disposal”. In March 2026 Reuters reported it would keep the business for now, partly because the price on offer was too low.

Match Group’s answer is to share. Its August 2026 letter to shareholders says it is “building shared capabilities that can support multiple brands over time”. It removed its chief operating officer role in March and closed its Archer app in June.

The pattern is the same everywhere: one platform, many brands, fewer people keeping each one alive.

5. When the operator fails

On 16 January 2026 the operating company behind Zoosk, EliteSingles, SilverSingles, Christian Mingle and JDate entered preliminary insolvency in Berlin. Its lender had stopped funding it. On 28 April, EliteSingles members were emailed that their “account and conversations will no longer be available” two days later.

The brands have since passed to new owners. Black Cap Holdings now runs Zoosk, JDate, Christian Mingle and LDS Singles. SuccessfulMatch relaunched EliteSingles “on a fresh foundation” with a new member database, and old logins no longer worked.

For anyone thinking about outsourcing, this is the risk to plan for. The answer isn’t to avoid partners. It’s to choose one that puts data export, code ownership and run-off in writing.

6. Safety is now the law

Since July 2025 dating apps in the UK have needed “highly effective” age checks under the Online Safety Act, with fines of up to £18m or 10% of global revenue. Ofcom counted more than 69 million age checks across services in the second half of 2025. Australia’s dating code has applied since April 2025. Tinder made its face check mandatory for new users worldwide in March 2026.

Meanwhile the harm is growing. Americans reported $1.16bn lost to romance scams in the first nine months of 2025. Bumble’s chief executive said that when she returned, “the top complaint was trust with profiles on the platform.” Safety used to be a cost centre. It is now a legal duty and a reason members stay or go.

7. The app store slice

App store rules are loosening. Match expects alternative payments to add about $110m to its profit in 2026. Bumble’s cost of revenue fell from 29% to 26% of revenue, helped by alternative billing. But store rules differ by country and keep changing, and in February 2026 Apple removed one of Match’s apps from the App Store, costing a $25m write-down and about $20m of revenue. Capturing the saving safely takes specialist payments work that most apps can’t staff.

8. AI changes what building costs

Grindr says AI tools have given it 2.5 times the engineering output with a team only 15% bigger, and that without them it would need around 200 more engineers. Match has doubled its AI budget and now treats it as “a new category of significant per-employee expense”. The gap between teams on modern platforms and teams maintaining old ones is getting wider, fast.

What it adds up to

Every pressure above lands on the technology: the servers, the safety team, the payments and the engineers who keep an old app alive. The groups with money are rebuilding or consolidating. Everyone else needs another way to get the same result.

Six moves for a dating CEO going into 2027

Price your platform per member, not per engineer. When payers fall, your costs should fall with them.
Put every brand on one platform. Yours, if you can afford to build and run it. Someone else’s, if you can’t.
Treat safety as part of the product. Verified profiles and fast human review are now table stakes and a legal duty.
Make payments work for you. Web checkout and alternative billing are real money, if someone can run them properly.
Spend engineering on what makes you different. Nobody chooses a dating app for its photo storage.
Stop paying to fill every room yourself. Shared pools, inside a group or across a network, cut the cost of keeping every town and every hour busy.

A note on sources. Figures come from company results, filings and the reports linked below. Executive quotes are from earnings call transcripts and should be checked against official recordings before reuse.

The 2026 squeeze: why dating apps are rebuilding, and why most can’t afford to.