The dating app giants are shrinking, and the reasons are now public record

For a long time, the case against dating apps was a feeling. People said they were burned out, that the apps felt rigged, that something about the whole experience left them lonelier than when they started. It was real, but it was anecdotal. You could not put a number on it.

Now you can. Over the past two years the discontent has moved out of group chats and into places that do not exaggerate: quarterly earnings reports, a string of legal settlements, and a class-action complaint. The numbers tell a remarkably consistent story, and it is not a happy one for the companies that defined online dating.

The giants are losing users

Start with Tinder, still the largest dating app in the world. By the end of 2025 it had about 8.8 million paying users, down 8 percent from the year before, and it had been shedding paying users for more than two years straight. Its parent company, Match Group, reported that quarterly direct revenue fell 3 percent, a decline it attributed almost entirely to subscriber loss.

Here is the detail that says the most. Even as paying users left, the revenue squeezed from each remaining one went up. Tinder's revenue per payer climbed to about 17.63 dollars, and the same pattern, fewer but higher-spending subscribers, showed up across the wider industry. Fewer customers, each paying more, is not what a healthy, growing product looks like. It is what a business looks like when it leans harder on the people who have not left yet.

Fewer customers, each paying more, is not a growth story. It is a business getting more out of the people who have not walked away yet.

The valuations have collapsed

Bumble tells an even starker version. The company went public in 2021 to enormous excitement and a valuation around 8 billion dollars. Its stock has since fallen more than 90 percent from those highs. In 2025 it laid off a large share of its workforce, and earlier that year it shut down two apps it had acquired, including Official, a relationship app for couples it had bought only two years before. The company that built its brand on a better kind of dating spent 2025 retreating to its core swiping product.

The regulators and the courts have noticed

The pressure is not only financial. In under a year, Match Group settled three separate matters with regulators or in court, and the through-line across them is hard to miss.

In August 2025, the company agreed to pay 14 million dollars to settle a Federal Trade Commission case that had been running for nearly six years. The FTC alleged that Match advertised a deceptive "six-month guarantee," buried its cancellation process behind confusing steps, and in some cases locked users out of their accounts after billing disputes even when it had already taken their money. As part of the settlement, Match agreed to disclose its terms clearly and make canceling straightforward.

In March 2026, Match settled a second FTC matter, this one about privacy. The agency alleged that OkCupid had handed roughly three million user photos, along with location and demographic data, to a facial recognition company back in 2014, contrary to its own privacy policy and without telling users. The settlement came with no fine, because the FTC lacks the authority to impose one for this kind of violation, but it bound the company to years of privacy oversight.

Then in 2026, Tinder agreed to a 60.5 million dollar settlement to resolve a class action alleging that it charged users over the age of 30 more than younger users for the same premium features, in violation of California's anti-discrimination law. Roughly 268,000 California users were covered. Tinder denied any wrongdoing.

Those are resolved settlements, not just accusations. A further class-action complaint, working its way through the courts since early 2024, goes after the design itself, alleging that Tinder, Hinge, and other Match apps are built with game-like, addictive features engineered to lock users into a "pay-to-play loop" rather than help them meet someone. Match called that suit "ridiculous." Taken together, the pattern is consistent: a run of disputes over whether these products treat the people who pay for them fairly.

This is the model, not bad luck

It would be easy to read all of this as a run of misfortune. It is better understood as the model working exactly as designed, and finally showing the strain.

When your product is a monthly subscription sold to single people, your best customer is someone who stays single and keeps paying. A match that turns into a relationship and walks off the app is, on the balance sheet, lost revenue. The incentives point quietly away from the thing users actually want. We pulled that thread in a separate post on why most dating apps make money when you stay single. The rising revenue per user, the dark patterns the FTC fined, the addictive design the lawsuit describes: these are all what that one incentive looks like under pressure.

It is worth being precise about who is hurting. The user-side exhaustion has been measured too, and we covered the burnout surveys in our piece on swipe fatigue. What is new here is that the same story now shows up on the business side, in the audited numbers. When users are tired and the financials are slipping in the same direction, that is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect.

The exception that proves the rule

Not every app is shrinking, and the exception is the most revealing part. Even as Tinder lost paying users, Hinge, which markets itself as the app "designed to be deleted" and leans toward people who want real relationships, kept growing. The healthy part of the market is the part built around intention rather than endless swiping. People are not abandoning dating apps because they have given up on finding someone. They are leaving the apps that treat them like inventory.

That is the gap. The old model optimized for time on the app and monthly renewals, and it is aging badly in public. The opportunity is a different bet entirely: fewer, more considered matches, and a business that succeeds when its users do.

That bet is the whole reason Bloom exists. Bloom is the dating app that grows with you, built so that we do well when our users' relationships do, not when they stay single and keep swiping. You can read more about how we make money on our pricing page.

Bloom is pre-launch, starting in Utah along the Wasatch Front. The only thing to do today is join the waitlist and grow with us.