The hard to swallow answer here is this:

Dating apps, like all apps, are majorly funded by giant companies, because there’s no realistic path to scaling up from 100 users to millions of users without a bunch of investment money.

Say I want to create a new, decent app that takes us back to the days of stuff like early OkCupid which was smartly done and actually worked okay.

Well, if it gets any amount of quick adoption, I’ll be going from really low costs to astronomical hosting costs almost overnight. Often, the “checks haven’t cleared” as they say and while you’ve technically been paid, it’s all waiting in escrow or bank transfers or what fucking have you and you have giant bills falling due and no way to pay them

That’s why this happens to every single app under the sun. They’re left making tough decisions and selling out to unscrupulous people.

Because what no one wants to admit is that the funding model to how to make almost anything function on the internet at-scale where millions of people use it is fundamentally broken.

I mean fuck, isn’t that why we’re on the federated splinter-net where people can justify the costs of their small corner of federation, easing the overall load of financial demand?

Corporate internet is broken and they’re chasing ridiculously thin numbers to constantly be making more.

So, you’d probably need some kind of federated solution to not have it be destroyed by corporatized enshittification.