this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
I suspect you'll have one big pain point to address that most apps other than the few big ones struggle with: The network effect. How do you get enough people on your app that it's worth it for people to get on your app?
Suspect you need either a really visible feature you can advertise ("we're not enshittified" alone isn't necessarily enough to sway people), or a ton of advertising budget.
I toyed with the idea of building an app myself, wanted to build something similar to what OKCupid used to be, where you could optionally answer questions about yourself and calculate compatibility based on those. Building an actually good algorithm to find you people you'd most likely truly like seemed interesting. Then I realized I don't have the time to see it through as a project to the point I'd get a truly active userbase and I'd have to run it at a loss for at least a few years so I can't quit my other work. Hope you do better, match.com truly needs some competition.
I recommend you take a look at Breeze. It is a dating app in the Netherlands (and expanding).
When you match, you get a date planner (after paying for the date). No chatting allowed. A real date or nothing. That is the premise. You pay per date, and you get your money back if the date is cancelled or they don't show up. So the app earns money from sending people on real dates. People that don't show up or cancel dates are penalized by the algorithn and they loose badges on their profile. This is good for Breeze, who wants people to go on dates, and good for the users, who want to go on dates.
Chatting is allowed a couple of hours before the date, but this is not intended for conversations, only for practical purposes.
As a result, profiles also matter much more. For both sides. You litterally need to sell yourself, because if someone swippes on you, they may need to pay 10 euro for the date if you also swipe on them.
You also get only a handful of profiles each day. Which makes sense, because you can limit the number of concurrent matches/dates, hence the app is better off distributing the matches, rather than piling them onto the 10% hotest accounts.
This also means you can't spend more than 15 to 30 minutes a day going over 5 tot 10 profiles.
Meanwhile, the app can provide free accounts, where people only need to pay for actual dates, hence the entry barier is lower than Tinder, where men won't get seen without paying. Meaning it is easy to get a userbase going.
I suspect the hard part is the logistics of setting up the dates. A spot in a bar or coffee place needs to be organized for each date. If that is no option, the users are asked to choose a meeting spot (talking to eachother via an intermediate person.
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they're the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I've ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn't really dealt with those. You'll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
Thanks a lot for sharing. I have a Community Manager background and also was a moderator at Jaumo. Having a place to engage can be fun, but I am not fully sure yet if people really want to do that, when they just want to date. I have to think about it and maybe I will add something as an optional feature.
One of the things I am doing is launching with a wait list, so that an area can populate first, before opening the gates. This avoids the problem of feeling alone.
Not sure if you’re open to collaboration on the app: I was thinking of making one with a few novel takes.
Fun fact: I worked with a guy at IBM who wrote some of the original algorithms for Match.com back in the day.
I was thinking about how I’d like to work on projects like these. Collaboration can be very fun and engaging. For this app, I am basically done already, so the next step is to verify if the features work with real people. If it turns out to be a success, I will come back to you and will open the doors happily, as two brains are always better than one.
Wicked. If you need a tester let me know. I’m familiar with TestFlight, too.
I’ve started planning a mobile OS and a handful of other apps, FOSS primarily. Worked in the industry for about 12 years doing devops/sys eng/ and some software dev. Collaboration can be the secret sauce sometimes.
GL regardless. I love seeing fresh takes on an otherwise saturated and greedy industry.
Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.
Hi, I'm from the EU, I have the right to get all of my data removed from a centralized service using GDPR. How do I do it on a decentralized one?
Leaving aside the whole issue of those companies not being trustworthy about the data deletion, at least my profile won't be public when its' been deleted and I've got someone to make a complaint about if I have reason to think they've lied about it. The fines can be pretty high. With federation, actually getting all copies of your profile deleted is nearly impossible. With torrent style decentralization, it seems completely impossible. Everyone will have access to everyone else's data and it'll be trivial to make backups.
Presumably most people would be using this on their phones with mostly their mobile data. An issue with the bittorrent protocol is that to open a connection, one peer has to have a port forwarded. Is this different with webtorrent?
Federation is simpler than true P2P here, but you then still need to trust the instance admins. It's fine for Lemmy/piefed style media for me because I don't put my real name, face and other details here.
My personal opinion is that a centralized alternative owned by a foundation rather than a for-profit company would be best of both worlds: No profit motive, just like decentralized. A centralized entity that holds liability in case there's a data leak or someone starts spreading CSAM. And ability for said centralized entity to moderate said CSAM, scams and other reports.
Well it depends how it’s built. It’s possible to make a decentralized instance where an account exists and there’s a ledger of accounts but what in that account isn’t there at all, it’s just an ID an authenticated user logs in and grabs on to. Then, messages and photos travel between nodes on the network rather than being stored on a server and pulled off it. Your pics and messages come from your device. I2P and reticulum already do stuff like this, webtorrent could provide a ledger of accounts without having to rely on darknet tech, the developer could roll his own, there’s plenty of options.
If it’s regional, I see no reason to have centralized abusable storage involved at all.
Do they have to be scams though? Why or why not?
What is the potential of a dating app that isn't a scam?
You've missed the big one. Those aren't people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can't fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.
US bars suck too as a way of meeting people. Too ritualized, too fake, often too noisy to have a conversation or the whole thing is set up to be a meat market.
Pubs in the UK are better, but it's a slower game.
I'll accept that. People suck in general, but its the only game in town.
I'm perfectly happy to see the entire dating app thing die under a flood of slop and abuse.