On again, off again: Can Feeld keep up with non-monogamy’s big moment?
On again, off again: Can Feeld keep up with non-monogamy’s big moment?
As non-monogamous relationships go mainstream, the dating app is feeling some growing pains.
On a Tuesday in early December of 2023, nine months after she’d given up on monogamy, Luna tapped into her favorite dating app to message a man about a date. The two thirty-something-year-olds from Virginia had made plans to meet up for the first time on Friday, but they hadn’t yet exchanged phone numbers—or real names. Like most people on Feeld, “a dating app for the curious,” Luna and her match used pseudonyms in their profiles. But Luna couldn’t log into the app to confirm the date details.
Wednesday passed, then Thursday, and still she couldn’t access her messages. Despite her rising anxiety, Luna drove to the prearranged location at the prearranged time. The app sprung back to life in the nick of time, and the date went as planned. This story has a happy (non-monogamous) ending.
But other Feeld members weren’t as lucky. According to complaints on X, Reddit, and the app stores, some users couldn’t log into Feeld for weeks—including those who paid for the app’s Majestic membership, which costs $24.99 for 30 days, $42.99 for 90 days, or $124.99 for a year. Matches disappeared and ghost notifications haunted users, in some cases for months.
These issues were the result of a major app update that had been in the works at Feeld for more than 10 months. The update was part of a bigger brand refresh, which Feeld publicized as a new chapter for the company and its community. To many users, though, the update resulted in “the biggest/worst cockblock in history” according to one X user—a sentiment echoed with vibrating frustration by a chorus of others. For a product category that requires people to be terrifyingly vulnerable with strangers, the Feeld update debacle was more than a technical glitch. It was a breach of trust.
The Feeld fail couldn’t have come at a worse time for the tech company. Since first launching as 3nder in 2014 (it later rebranded to Feeld in 2016), Feeld has become a relied-upon conduit for many in the ethical non-monogamy (ENM), polyamory, kink, and queer communities. And if you haven’t been paying attention over the past few years, cultural interest in non-monogamy and other nontraditional forms of relationships have exploded into the spotlight.
A 2023 YouGov poll reported that a third of Americans described their ideal relationship as something other than pure monogamy, a significant shift from 2016’s poll results. And a report from earlier this year found that almost a third of Americans have actually tried consensual non-monogamy. In this climate, Feeld has been sprinting to keep up with its audience.
Whereas the big players in the space like Tinder, The League, Hinge, and OkCupid are all owned by Match Group, Feeld is fully independent and not venture capital-backed—and intends to stay that way. (The company claims it has been profitable solely from paying members since 2017.) As Feeld’s monthly active users grew by 190% and paid memberships skyrocketed 550% over the past three years, the app’s technical capacities strained under the pressure.
Wrangling the app’s outdated tech stack and refreshing the 3nder-era brand became priority number one, says Feeld’s CEO, Ana Kirova. The app update finally enabled the team to ship features closer to an industry-standard rate, a necessary step forward for the company and its product. “There’s a pace that we owe our customers, and now we can serve that,” says Kirova.
Plenty of Feeld users complained about the update that broke the app for the holiday, but Feeld had always been buggy and slow. That was the big reason for the frontend and backend refresh in the first place. But unlike other big players in the dating app industry that have faced increasingly angry users and legal action, Feeld’s community has remained fiercely loyal despite the issues. (Match Group is currently battling user-initiated lawsuits about intentionally addictive app designs and Better Business Bureau complaints of manipulative business practices.) Engagement on Feeld even went up after the update: users are looking at 30% more profiles than on the previous version.
“I am still grateful that [Feeld] exists,” says Luna, who identifies as queer, and asked that her real name remain private. “It has definitely been a positive thing in my life, and that’s why people like me have complaints. I have high standards for it because it brings a lot of good and joy to my life—and I want it to continue doing that.”
The aftermath of the November release laid bare the challenge ahead for Feeld, which must contend with competition from the major players adding non-monogamous options to their offerings, as well as eager upstarts in the ENM space. Without big money backing, Feeld is working to support a growing community on its own. Its wrestling with the challenges and responsibilities that come with running a technical platform at a critical cultural moment—and for a group of people who in many ways view it as a lifeline of sorts.
Feeld’s backstory is personal for Kirova. In 2014, Kirova’s partner, Dimo Trifonov, created 3nder because the couple wanted to explore opening their partnership to other relationships, and they couldn’t find a welcoming platform to date as a couple. Two years later, Tinder filed a lawsuit against the company for alleged copyright infringement, a move Trifonov publicly decried as “the big guy bullying.”
“Conglomerates are after pure profit and control,” Trifonov told ABC News at the time. “If we win, all the 270 independent dating apps are going to win with us.” But the underdog didn’t win. 3nder became Feeld, but kept its original logo: two hearts intertwining to make a third. By the time Kirova took over as CEO of Feeld in 2021, the company had grown to 22 employees. Today, it counts 78 people on its team full-time.
That’s a fraction of Match Group, which boasts 2,500 employees across its portfolio of companies. As the online dating conglomerate has grown, so has its revenue. In 2023, Match Group brought in $3.3 billion in revenue.
At the most basic level, all dating apps are the same, regardless of who’s behind them. There are people and profiles, likes and matches, messaging and the promise of meetups. But as with any tech platform—and any relationship—the details of the user experience make all the difference.
Over the years, each app has developed its own UX shorthand for what you’ll find on the app. Hinge is for long-term relationships and its profiles are styled like magazines with pull quotes in a sleek serif and wide photos spilling down the page. Tinder is for hookups, and the app includes a quick-to-deploy panic button for IRL encounters gone bad. Feeld’s users span communities including ENM and kink, but what holds them together is an interest in the less rigid and less broadly understood paths to connection.
In previous decades, those communities found each other through word-of-mouth meetups and in corners of the internet—as many subcultures did before the app era. But many who are part of the recent community growth are dating app natives whose first or second step in exploring their sexual and relationship identities was downloading Feeld. That’s the app working as intended. Part of the founding vision of Feeld was to make connection less stigmatized and more accessible for people seeking nontraditional relationships.
As a result, Feeld’s team designed its features with two goals that are seemingly at odds: openness and discretion. Whereas other apps require private information like phone numbers, email addresses, and full names to create a profile, Feeld’s setup flow is short and simple to encourage users to dip in a toe without commitment or rigid labels. The company has found that close to 40% of users expand their profiles over time as they get comfortable.
The flow prompts users to create a “Feeld name” (typically these are pseudonyms). And while rejecting a potential match makes it disappear forever on other dating apps, Feeld users can swipe forward and backward without passing permanent judgment. An ENM user can even pair their profile with their partner’s so they can look for matches together and then communicate through a group chat once they’ve found one. Many users are asking the company to expand the feature to support linking multiple partners.
But in its big update, Feeld made a change to how the app treated location, upsetting that careful balance of openness and discretion. Rather than showing a profile’s distance from you in miles (the minimum radius is three miles), the app switched to displaying the profile’s neighborhood as Hinge does. Users accustomed to a certain level of privacy were horrified. “This is not like New York,” says Luna of her town in Virginia. “A neighborhood here is a five-by-five block radius. That’s not a big area. I saw the change and I was like, ‘I’m absolutely not okay with somebody knowing the block I live on.’” In a matter of days, Feeld pulled location off profiles entirely.
Kirova understands that more capacity to launch features means more pressure to do so, and do it well. It took nearly two months for location to revert to the old format on Feeld profiles, but the team is working to iterate faster. The team launched 18 new updates in the four months since the overhaul (the app was updated only twice in the four months before the big relaunch). “With that cadence, it might mean you’ll make mistakes more often,” says Kirova. “You might take a wrong turn, and then have to nudge it back, but that’s something I’m also very excited about: I don’t think evolution and growth are linear. You have to learn. And the level of humility that comes with that is something I would never give back.”
The most compelling feature that Feeld offers its users is the critical mass of people who share their values—which, for now, is still a much smaller group than what’s found on the bigger dating apps. While the company declined to share user numbers, Feeld has about 65,000 ratings on the App Store whereas Hinge has 850,000 and Tinder boasts nearly 950,000. Headlines and social media may be buzzing with poly perspectives, but ENM is still not part of the mainstream.
Feeld offers a unique space in the dating app landscape where people don’t have to explain their relationship preferences or desires—or worse, defend them to a critical audience. The users I spoke with mentioned that as a major reason they’ve stayed on it through breakups and life changes. “I don’t have to explain the non-monogamous terms I’m using, like kitchen table polyamory,” says Kaylee Moser, who has written publicly about her positive experiences on the app. “I can just put that in my profile, and most people will know what it means.”
OkCupid has had a “non-monogamous” option in its app since 2016, and last year, Tinder and Hinge added one, too. But Hinge’s tagline, “designed to be deleted,” acknowledges the average user experience’s overall end goal: a monogamous, forever partnership. Feeld, however, refers to itself as an “open invitation to an open-ended journey,” welcoming connections that may never narrow to one.
But as with all tech platforms, the critical mass of Feeld’s community is tenuously held together by user trust. Feeld has managed to maintain the glue through the app update ordeal, but if users’ expectations are not met consistently in the future, they could start looking for a way out. “It really feels like there’s this niche carved out for us, which I’m really happy exists,” says Rachel, a Feeld user in Toronto who identifies as bisexual and prefers not to use her real name. “But when something goes wrong, I don’t feel like I have leverage to say, ‘Hey, you’re not getting my $20 a month anymore.’ I feel a little stuck and at the mercy of their tech team and their ability to keep up.”
In March, Feeld had issues with its chat functionality that lasted four days, which has added to its users’ frustrations. Luna, from Virginia, says she’s planning to deactivate her paid Majestic membership, but will stay on as a free member. “I’m frustratingly loyal,” she says, “because it still feels like the predominant app” for her communities. It’s true that there is no serious competitor to Feeld in the ENM or kink spaces yet, but on Reddit some users are eying nascent alternatives like #open, and others are making do with the suite of more traditional dating apps.
There is also an undeniable vibe shift in how people feel about dating apps in general, and Feeld is not immune to the spreading malaise. “There’s something in the water,” says Rachel. “Maybe people are just tired. I feel like a lot of folks are not being intentional about their usage [on the apps.] It’s like, swipe, swipe, swipe—what are you looking for? There was less of that on Feeld up until recently.”
Monogamous or otherwise, some people are giving up on dating through technology altogether. In 2023, Match Group reported a dip in paying app users and dating app downloads were down overall. And the next generation may be opting out of digital dating entirely: according to a 2024 Axios survey, 79% of college students don’t use any app regularly to find romantic partners. The majority said they’d prefer to meet new people in person.
To continue growing with its users, Feeld must contend with the same issues as the big dating apps—reliability, safety, community growth—without their big-budget resources. (Match Group recently hired Twitter’s Yoel Roth to lead its Trust and Safety team.) But Feeld has a unique challenge in the space, walking a careful line between industry standards and the nuanced user experience that makes its communities feel understood and supported.
The team has started to work on solving issues like identity verification, which can help prevent spammers but also ensure a user’s safety once they venture into a real-world date with a pseudonymous stranger. Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble even have photo verification processes to prove that not only are you who you say you are, but you look like yourself too.
Kirova says users have been requesting some form of verification for a while, and as a stopgap many have taken to creating their own verification processes. Luna shared that she and other Feeld users ask matches to send a selfie with the current date in view before meeting. “I think what we offer as a platform puts people in a very vulnerable position, and when we were smaller, I was very conscious about not demanding certain documents or proof from members because there’s something that feels intrusive about that,” says Kirova. “However, as we’ve grown, I am seeing the need for that.” Kirova promises that identity verification is in Feeld’s product plans.
Kirova says Feeld is careful about which features and trends to follow, and is particularly skeptical of the rush to use AI for matching. Tinder has integrated AI in its matching algorithm for years, and Bumble is using it to create conversational icebreakers, and to detect spammers and bots. Match Group recently announced (via an AI-written press release) that they’d entered into a set of licensing deals with OpenAI, with the group’s CEO promising a future where AI touches every aspect of their dating offerings from automatic photo selection to bio generation to new fully AI-driven apps.
Feeld doesn’t use AI in its matching algorithm, and isn’t blindly diving into the much-hyped technology. Rather, in a typically independent stance, the company “remains curious about all innovative possibilities,” but believes that the less they interfere with the algorithm, the more organic the connections can be. It’s a risk to stay out of that tech arms race, but Feeld users I spoke with appreciated the feeling that there weren’t a lot of mysterious levers behind the curtain at Feeld. What you see is what you get—in the app and within its community.
Feeld recognizes the power of what they’ve built is in the people they’ve been able to bring together, and Kirova and her team is working to better understand and leverage those communities. “Our vision is to be moving further away from traditional dating apps structures,” says Kirova. “The feedback we continuously get is about the people that people meet on Feeld, not about how the app works…How can we create these opportunities for people to meet each other and not stick too closely to the specific model of the dating apps that we’re all painfully familiar with?”
One way Feeld is approaching this question is by taking their connections into the real world. Like Bumble, Match, and Hinge, Feeld is experimenting with hosting IRL meetup events for members and their guests. So far, they’ve had regular events in New York, LA, Berlin, London, Sydney and Melbourne, plus one-offs in Toronto, Austin, Portland, Washington D.C., and Amsterdam. As they continue to improve the app experience, the team also plans to expand their offline experiences to other global cities, betting that this moment for non-traditional relationships is a cultural game-changer, and not a temporary fad.
For their part, Feeld users are relying on the company to keep the app working, first and foremost, but also to continue guiding the platform toward a more open and independent place—in contrast to the big players dominating the dating app space. “I’m always going to sing Feeld’s praises because I know that they’re doing the work to make things better,” says Rachel in Toronto. “I really hope Feeld’s not acquired, because maybe they can push all the other apps that are in the quote unquote, mainstream to do better too.”
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Fast Company – co-design
(22)
