Grindr is changing, inside and out.
Loading audio narration…
The company is in the midst of its big AI reboot. Everyone from engineers to designers is strapped with a slew of new tools. Users can see it, too, especially in the app’s new Edge subscription tier being tested at eye-popping prices ranging from $80 a week to hundreds of dollars.
Then there’s the question of advertising, one that has long challenged Grindr. How many ads are too many? And why are there so many mobile gaming ads that are annoyingly hard to exit?
I asked chief product officer AJ Balance about all this and more during a long talk at the company’s West Hollywood headquarters. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Grindr is growing. What departments are you beefing up?
Balance: We’re growing across the board. We’re building our engineering team, hiring some product managers and designers. We just hired a head of design who’s starting in a few weeks.
Does AI change who you need to hire?
Balance: Each job has the opportunity to be made even more productive with it. In engineering, we want people who are using these tools to code or are excited to learn these tools. Aptitude and wanting to learn are probably the most important things.
Say I’m a Grindr software engineer. What’s my AI diet?
Balance: We’re using Claude Code. That’s obviously a big one. We’re using OpenAI internally, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Codex. Across the company, we’re using different LLMs for writing memos, presentations, and increasingly spreadsheets. We’re using Gemini and Grok in some cases. The design team is using Midjourney, Sora, and ComfyUI. The list is long, and some of these tools get more use than others. 70% of our code is actually being checked in via AI, which is a really big milestone.
I read all these essays about changes in software development and some in the field complaining of AI fatigue. Is the job of the software engineer changing?
Balance: It’s definitely changing in a good way. In many cases, that’s shifting folks’ allocation of their time more toward reviewing code versus writing all the time. You used to have folks writing code and other folks who are peers or in more senior roles reviewing it. It’s helping everyone level up.
I’ve also seen the argument that AI is making everyone a manager. Do you agree?
Balance: It seems like it’s trending that way. If you think of agents as folks doing tasks, you’re starting to coordinate agents doing tasks.
The big news at Grindr is the AI subscription Edge, along with its test prices. Why is it so expensive?
Balance: We set the price for all of our products based on the value it delivers for users. For Edge, it’s helping people create more, better connections more easily. Grindr is a free product, and we care a lot about the free user. We’re a freemium business model, and over 90% of our users are free. But there is a set of users who want to pay for a lot more value. With these AI products, it’s like a set of superpowers.
Would you consider Edge to be a luxury product?
Balance: Edge is definitely a premium product. It’s premium value, premium price point. We do have a segment of users who want to pay a premium price for a lot of value, so we want to serve them too.
Grindr
I just saw a clip on Radio Andy talking about how expensive it is. Were you surprised that there’s been some backlash on the price points?
Balance: We do a lot of research upfront, like focus groups and surveys. As we’re building products, we get a lot of feedback along the way. We do a live beta group, and we did that with Edge. What we’ve heard publicly is largely in line with what users said, which is that, for some folks, it’s really valuable and they want to pay for it. Not everyone wants or needs to pay for it. For some of those folks, it’s less interesting, which we’re totally okay with.
I just came from a Tinder conference, where they announced bringing some things out from behind the paywall. It seems like people are getting tired of having to pay for so much. How do you think about subscription fatigue?
Balance: We really value the free user experience. We listen to our users a lot on paywalls and ads. We’ve said now that we’re going to do some targeted rollbacks on those things to make the free experience great. It’s definitely something we think about. I had a meeting on it this week.
I got some emails about the quantity of ads on Grindr. Are you thinking about that ad density?
Balance: We are. We’re really proud of our ads team, and they’ve grown the business quite a lot. We’ve heard from users that the ad load or types of ads could be better. In some cases, we’ll roll back some of the load. In many cases, we’re looking at new formats. We’re introducing reward ads, which are: if you watch the ad, you get some minutes ad-free or you get access to one of our premium features.
We’re super privacy-forward as a company. The needs of our user base mandate that. It’s super challenging for many folks here and abroad to be gay. One of the reasons the ads that we have on the app aren’t great is because we don’t share almost any data with advertisers. We’re thinking about ways we could improve that.
There’s been such a downturn in sentiment around dating apps. Is Grindr spared from swipe fatigue?
Balance: Because our users don’t swipe, it is different. The grid, open chat model is a subtle product difference, but it leads to a really different user experience. The types of connections you have are different and more varied. I don’t really hear about swipe fatigue from our users.
