Case Study: How Gaydar Saved Big and Achieved 4x ROAS
Gaydar Partners with HubPeople, Saving Six Figures Annually and Achieving 4x ROAS on Marketing Campaigns
Douglas, Isle of Man – 25th September 2025
Gaydar, one of the world’s most iconic gay dating communities, has successfully migrated its platform to HubPeople, the leading provider of white-label dating infrastructure. Just months after the transition, Gaydar is already seeing transformative results in profitability, customer satisfaction, and marketing performance.
By partnering with HubPeople, Gaydar has reduced annual overhead costs by more than six figures across infrastructure, customer support, and moderation. These savings go straight to the bottom line, allowing the brand to reinvest in marketing, events, and community initiatives to drive growth.
Within just 2–3 months of launch, Gaydar has:
- Matched its legacy platform’s revenue per user performance and is on a steady growth trajectory.
- Achieved a 4x return on ad spend (ROAS) from performance marketing campaigns.
- Begun work on a new iOS native app, developed by HubPeople, to expand user engagement even further.
Motivation for Change
Having taken over the running of the Brand over 18 months ago, the new owner took time to assess and analyse the performance and cost involved in running the platform. It became clear that the business, which was once a market-leading brand, had been neglected and had stagnated.
The business was expensive to run and not profitable.
The offering was old, disjointed, costly to run and was way behind the curve in terms of features and functionality. The options were to either continue investing time and money into an ageing platform, rebuild from scratch or to migrate to a full service solution.
Continuing in the same direction would have resulted in continued revenue decline and increased cost to support and fix an old infrastructure that would become obsolete within 2 years. Rebuilding would prove expensive and eat up valuable cash. The decision was made to move to a full solution. Allowing all revenue to be reinvested in customer acquisition, marketing, advertising and promotional activity.
The HubPeople Solution
HubPeople provides a unified desktop, mobile web, and native app platform that serves as a complete turn-key solution for dating brands. The infrastructure covers:
- Tech hosting & security
- Fraud management
- User subscription handling
- Content moderation & CRM
- Community tools
- Custom billing in 17 currencies
This allows Gaydar’s team to focus on what they do best: building a strong brand, acquiring customers, and fostering an authentic gay community.
The Migration Process
HubPeople and Gaydar engineers worked together to ensure a seamless transition for millions of users. All profiles, passwords, media, likes, messages, and user history were imported from the legacy system.
Gaydar users were also integrated into a gay super-niche within HubPeople’s 100 million-strong global user base, instantly increasing the pool of potential matches.
The new platform also brings enhanced trust and safety features, including:
- ID verification
- User age assurance
- Explicit image filtering
- Expanded dating safety tips
Legacy Billing Integration
To minimise disruption, Gaydar and HubPeople developed a billing system that allowed users with existing subscriptions to remain on Gaydar’s legacy merchant account. As subscriptions expire, users transition smoothly to HubPeople’s billing system, ensuring continuity and customer satisfaction.
Customer Retention
Recognising that a UI change can be disruptive to loyal users, HubPeople’s Founder Success team worked with Gaydar on a teaser campaign and free premium access for early adopters of the new platform. This boosted goodwill and kept engagement levels high during the migration.
Results So Far
- Migration completed in late June.
- Within three months, Gaydar’s revenue per user is already equalling legacy performance and climbing steadily.
- Performance marketing spend is generating a 4x return within the same month.
- Six figures saved annually in overhead costs.
- Gaydar team are now freed from technical, moderation, and payment challenges to focus on brand, marketing and community building.
User feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with specific praise for the new trust and safety features.
Voices from the Partnership
Steve Pammenter, Owner of Gaydar:
“Gaydar is a legacy brand with millions of users, so we needed to ensure that we chose the right strategic partner to support our growth plans. The team at HubPeople understood that the user needed to be at the heart of the move and it needed to be seamless. This was certainly the case and has allowed us to focus on returning the business to growth.”
Michael O’Sullivan, Owner of HubPeople:
“This is a fantastic example of how the right partnership can reap outsized results. By letting us handle the dating infrastructure, where we have deep expertise, Gaydar is free to apply its know-how to building the best possible gay community. It’s energising for my team to see Gaydar’s success and the positive reaction from their user base.”
About HubPeople
Founded in 2005, HubPeople is the world’s largest private-label dating platform provider, powering hundreds of dating brands globally. With a user base exceeding 100 million members, HubPeople provides a fully managed infrastructure solution, including hosting, payments, fraud protection, content moderation, and apps. The company is headquartered in Douglas, Isle of Man.
