Grindr เผยผลประกอบการไตรมาส 3/2026: ปรับเพิ่มคาดการณ์ผลประกอบการ ขณะที่ Edge และ Freddie ช่วยขยายโอกาสการเติบโต

Grindr (NYSE: GRND) รายงานรายได้ในไตรมาส 3/2026 เติบโต 22% เมื่อเทียบเป็นรายปี โดยได้แรงหนุนจากรายได้บนแอปพลิเคชัน การเติบโตของผู้ใช้แบบชำระเงิน และการโฆษณา ทั้งนี้ ฝ่ายบริหารได้ปรับเพิ่มแนวโน้มผลประกอบการปี 2026 และเปิดเผยคาดการณ์เบื้องต้นสำหรับปี 2027 ซึ่งรวมการดำเนินงานของ Edge และ Freddie เข้าไปด้วย

ประเด็นสำคัญ

• รายได้ในไตรมาส 3 เพิ่มขึ้น 22% เมื่อเทียบเป็นรายปี แตะที่ 141 ล้านดอลลาร์ ขณะที่ EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วเพิ่มขึ้น 13% สู่ระดับ 62 ล้านดอลลาร์ คิดเป็นอัตรากำไร 44%
• รายได้บนแอปพลิเคชันเติบโต 22% แตะที่ 118 ล้านดอลลาร์ โดยจำนวนผู้ใช้แบบชำระเงินโดยเฉลี่ยเพิ่มขึ้น 11% สู่ระดับ 1.4 ล้านราย ขณะที่รายได้เฉลี่ยต่อผู้ใช้ (ARPU) เพิ่มขึ้น 10% แตะที่ 27.15 ดอลลาร์
• Grindr ปรับเพิ่มคาดการณ์ผลประกอบการปี 2026 โดยคาดว่ารายได้จะอยู่ที่อย่างน้อย 560 ล้านดอลลาร์ และ EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วจะอยู่ที่อย่างน้อย 236 ล้านดอลลาร์ ทั้งนี้ แนวโน้มดังกล่าวคาดการณ์ว่า Freddie จะมีสัดส่วนรายได้เข้ามาเพียงเล็กน้อยในไตรมาส 4
• คาดการณ์เบื้องต้นสำหรับปี 2027 ระบุว่ารายได้จะอยู่ที่อย่างน้อย 705 ล้านดอลลาร์ และ EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วจะอยู่ที่ 275 ล้านดอลลาร์ ซึ่งบ่งชี้ถึงการเติบโตประมาณ 26% และอัตรากำไรอย่างน้อย 39% เมื่อเทียบกับแนวโน้มปี 2026
• Edge มีกำหนดเปิดตัวทั่วโลกในวันที่ 17 พฤศจิกายน ในราคาช่วงแนะนำที่ 120 ดอลลาร์ต่อเดือน หลังจากเปิดให้เข้าใช้งานล่วงหน้าเมื่อวันที่ 10 พฤศจิกายน โดยมีผู้ใช้เกือบ 400,000 รายลงทะเบียนเข้าใช้งานล่วงหน้าภายในเวลา 72 ชั่วโมง
• ฝ่ายบริหารคาดว่า Freddie จะมีจำนวนผู้ป่วยในสหรัฐฯ ประมาณ 12,000 ราย ณ สิ้นปี 2026 และเชื่อว่าการจัดวางตำแหน่งภายในแอป Grindr โดยตรง (native placements) จะสามารถรองรับผู้ป่วยได้ถึง 50,000 รายในระยะกลาง

ผลการดำเนินงานทางการเงินหลัก

Grindr ได้ซื้อหุ้นคืนประมาณ 13 ล้านหุ้น คิดเป็นมูลค่า 180 ล้านดอลลาร์ ในช่วง 9 เดือนแรกของปี 2026 ที่ราคาเฉลี่ย 13.83 ดอลลาร์ก่อนหักภาษีสรรพสามิต ขณะที่ธุรกรรมของ Freddie มีการจ่ายค่าตอบแทนเป็นหุ้นมูลค่า 60 ล้านดอลลาร์ ซึ่งคิดเป็นหุ้น Grindr ประมาณ 4 ล้านหุ้น และเมื่อคำนวณรวมหุ้นดังกล่าวแล้ว ฝ่ายบริหารประเมินว่ามีจำนวนหุ้นลดลงสุทธิประมาณ 9 ล้านหุ้น

ผลการดำเนินงานทางธุรกิจและการปฏิบัติงาน

จำนวนผู้ใช้งานรายเดือนเพิ่มขึ้น 13% ตั้งแต่ปี 2024 และในปัจจุบันผู้ใช้ใช้เวลาเฉลี่ยเกือบ 70 นาทีต่อวันบน Grindr โดยฝ่ายบริหารระบุว่าความคืบหน้านี้เป็นผลมาจากการยกเครื่องโครงสร้างพื้นฐานของแอปพลิเคชันและระบบแชต ฟีเจอร์ Right Now ระบบแนะนำที่ขับเคลื่อนด้วย AI และการเปิดตัว Maps เมื่อเร็ว ๆ นี้

Edge มีเป้าหมายที่จะเป็นตัวขับเคลื่อนหลักของรายได้ระดับพรีเมียม โดยในเบื้องต้น Grindr วางแผนที่จะจำกัดการเป็นสมาชิกไว้ที่ไม่เกิน 1% ของจำนวนผู้ใช้งานรายเดือน ฝ่ายบริหารระบุว่า หากเข้าถึงผู้ใช้ได้ในสัดส่วนสองในสามของ 1% ของ MAU ที่ราคา 120 ดอลลาร์ต่อเดือน จะสร้างโอกาสทางรายได้ต่อปีถึง 150 ล้านดอลลาร์ หากสมาชิกใช้บริการต่อเนื่องครบหนึ่งปีเต็ม อย่างไรก็ตาม บริษัทไม่ได้คาดหวังว่าจะบรรลุเป้าหมายระดับดังกล่าวในปีแรก และมองว่าการทำได้ 20% ถึง 30% ของเป้าหมายนั้นถือเป็นผลลัพธ์ที่แข็งแกร่งแล้ว

นอกจากนี้ Grindr ยังเสร็จสิ้นการเข้าซื้อกิจการ PurposeMed ซึ่งเป็นบริษัทแม่ของ Freddie โดยระบุว่า ตำแหน่งการจัดวางแบบเนทีฟที่เคยสร้างขึ้นสำหรับ Woodwork มากกว่าครึ่งหนึ่งได้ถูกนำมาใช้สำหรับ Freddie แล้ว ซึ่งจากการทดสอบก่อนหน้านี้ การจัดวางแบบเนทีฟสามารถสร้างอัตราการตอบรับได้ดีกว่าโฆษณาทั่วไปเกือบ 2.5 เท่า ขณะที่ 3 ใน 4 ของผู้ใช้ Grindr ในสหรัฐฯ ที่ลงทะเบียนกับ Freddie ไม่เคยใช้ยา PrEP มาก่อน

ฝ่ายบริหารประเมินว่า ผู้ป่วยของ Freddie ในสหรัฐฯ จำนวน 50,000 รายที่ได้รับบริการการแพทย์ทางไกลและบริการด้านเภสัชกรรมครบหนึ่งปีเต็ม อาจสร้างรายได้ต่อปีได้ประมาณ 240 ล้านดอลลาร์ และเมื่อคิดอัตรากำไร EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วที่อย่างน้อย 40% จะเทียบเท่ากับ EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วต่อปีเกือบ 100 ล้านดอลลาร์ ทั้งนี้ ตัวเลขดังกล่าวเป็นเป้าหมายระยะกลางของฝ่ายบริหาร ไม่ใช่ผลการดำเนินงานในปัจจุบัน

คาดการณ์ของฝ่ายบริหาร

ฝ่ายบริหารระบุว่า คาดการณ์สำหรับปี 2027 รวมการลงทุนเพื่อขยายโครงสร้างพื้นฐานด้านคลินิกและร้านขายยาของ Freddie ในสหรัฐฯ โดยคาดว่า Freddie จะช่วยเพิ่มจำนวนเงิน EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วรวม แม้ว่าการลงทุนเหล่านั้นจะส่งผลให้อัตรากำไรรวมในรูปเปอร์เซ็นต์ลดลงเล็กน้อยก็ตาม

คาดว่าสัดส่วนรายได้จากโฆษณาจะชะลอตัวลงสู่ระดับ 15% ถึง 16% ของรายได้รวมในปี 2027 ขณะเดียวกัน ฝ่ายบริหารยังคาดว่าจะสูญเสียรายได้จากการโฆษณาโดยตรงของกลุ่มการแพทย์ทางไกลประมาณ 10 ล้านดอลลาร์ หลังจากควบรวม Freddie เข้ามา ทั้งนี้ รายได้จากโฆษณาจะยังคงเติบโตต่อไป แต่จะเติบโตช้ากว่าช่วงไม่กี่ปีที่ผ่านมา

VIP ซึ่งเป็นระดับสมาชิกในอนาคตที่ผสมผสานฟีเจอร์ในแอปเข้ากับประสบการณ์ออฟไลน์ ยังไม่มีการรวมรายได้เข้าไว้ในคาดการณ์ปี 2027 โดย Grindr มีแผนที่จะวางตำแหน่งผลิตภัณฑ์นี้เพื่อโอกาสในการเติบโตในปี 2028

ความเสี่ยงและประเด็นที่ต้องจับตามอง

• ผลประกอบการตามมาตรฐาน GAAP ในไตรมาส 3 รวมค่าใช้จ่ายพิเศษครั้งเดียวจำนวน 33 ล้านดอลลาร์ จากการประนีประนอมยอมความทางคดีในอดีตที่สหราชอาณาจักร ซึ่งเกี่ยวข้องกับแนวปฏิบัติด้านข้อมูลก่อนปี 2020
• การขยายขนาดธุรกิจของ Freddie จำเป็นต้องเพิ่มขีดความสามารถด้านร้านขายยา การสรรหาบุคลากร การดำเนินงานด้านกฎระเบียบ และการจัดการพัฒนาธุรกิจ โดย Grindr มีแผนที่จะเพิ่มร้านขายยาในสหรัฐฯ อย่างน้อยอีก 1 แห่ง และขยายขีดความสามารถในการสั่งซื้อทางไปรษณีย์
• การเติบโตของจำนวนผู้ป่วยของ Freddie คาดว่าจะดำเนินไปในอัตราที่ชะลอลงในปี 2027 ขณะที่บริษัทกำลังสร้างโครงสร้างพื้นฐานและโอนย้ายผู้ป่วยไปยังร้านขายยาในเครือ
• ฝ่ายบริหารระบุว่า บักในโค้ดที่สร้างโดย AI และภัยคุกคามทางไซเบอร์ที่เพิ่มขึ้นจากผู้โจมตีที่ใช้ AI เป็นด้านที่จำเป็นต้องมีการติดตามดูแลอย่างใกล้ชิด
• อัตรากำไร EBITDA ปรับปรุงแล้วในไตรมาส 3 ลดลงจาก 47% สู่ระดับ 44% โดยช่วงเดียวกันของปีก่อนหน้าได้รับประโยชน์จากค่าใช้จ่ายในการพัฒนาผลิตภัณฑ์ที่บันทึกเป็นสินทรัพย์ในระดับที่สูงกว่า

ประเด็นสำคัญจากการตอบคำถามนักวิเคราะห์

ฝ่ายบริหารระบุว่า Edge จะเป็นปัจจัยขับเคลื่อนการเติบโตส่วนเพิ่มที่ใหญ่ที่สุดภายในแอปพลิเคชันหลักสำหรับปี 2027 โดยบริษัทตั้งใจที่จะนำรายได้ที่มีอัตรากำไรสูงของ Edge มาช่วยสนับสนุนเงินทุนในการลงทุนของ Freddie ขณะเดียวกันก็ยังคงรักษาโครงสร้างอัตรากำไรตามที่ระบุไว้

สำหรับ Freddie นั้น การโอนย้ายใบสั่งยาจากร้านขายยาภายนอกมายังร้านขายยาในเครือ อาจช่วยเพิ่มรายได้ต่อปีประมาณ 2,400 ดอลลาร์ต่อผู้ป่วยหนึ่งรายที่ใช้บริการต่อเนื่องตลอดทั้งปี โดยฝ่ายบริหารระบุว่า สัดส่วนรายได้ที่คาดหวังจะอยู่ที่ประมาณ 60% จากการแพทย์ทางไกล และ 40% จากร้านขายยา

Grindr วางแผนที่จะผสานการทำงานของ Freddie เข้ากับแอปพลิเคชันให้ลึกซึ้งยิ่งขึ้น ซึ่งรวมถึงการเข้าถึงบริการ PrEP ได้โดยตรง การเพิ่มตำแหน่งจัดวางแบบเนทีฟ ตราสัญลักษณ์ยืนยันข้อมูลการตรวจ HIV หรือข้อมูลใบสั่งยาซึ่งเป็นทางเลือกสำหรับผู้ใช้ ตลอดจนโอกาสในการเข้าถึง Grindr ระดับพรีเมียมสำหรับผู้ป่วยของ Freddie ทั้งนี้ ฝ่ายบริหารเน้นย้ำว่าจะมีการแบ่งปันข้อมูลสุขภาพก็ต่อเมื่อได้รับความยินยอมจากผู้ใช้เท่านั้น

ในด้านการพัฒนาผลิตภัณฑ์ Grindr ระบุว่า โครงสร้างพื้นฐานที่ยกเครื่องใหม่ช่วยลดปัญหาแอปขัดข้องและบักลงได้ ทำให้สามารถจัดสรรทรัพยากรวิศวกรไปใช้กับผลิตภัณฑ์ใหม่ ๆ และยกระดับประสบการณ์ของผู้ใช้บริการฟรี โดยบริษัทประเมินว่า ในปัจจุบันวิศวกรผลิตภัณฑ์แต่ละคนมีประสิทธิภาพการทำงานสูงขึ้นประมาณ 2.5 ถึง 3 เท่า เมื่อเทียบกับช่วง 12 ถึง 18 เดือนที่ผ่านมา ซึ่งช่วยให้วิศวกรผลิตภัณฑ์ประมาณ 60 คนสามารถรองรับภาระงานด้านการพัฒนาที่กว้างขึ้นได้

บทถอดเสียงการแถลงผลประกอบการฉบับเต็ม

บทถอดเสียงฉบับเต็มของการประชุมทางโทรศัพท์ผลประกอบการ

คำชี้แจงจากฝ่ายบริหาร

Operator

Good day, everyone. My name is Catherine, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the Grindr Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Tolu Adeofe, Head of Investor Relations.

Tolu Adeofe

Thank you, moderator. Hello, and welcome to the Grindr Earnings Call for the Third Quarter 2026. Today's call will be led by Grindr's CEO, George Arison; and CFO, John North, who will make a few brief remarks. George will then be joined by Alda Chan, VP of Finance, for the Q&A session.

Please note, Grindr released its shareholder letter this afternoon, and this is available on the SEC's website and Grindr's Investor page at investors.grindr.com. Before we begin, I will remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss our outlook, future performance and future prospects. You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.

These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of the risks that could cause our actual results to differ from views expressed in our forward-looking statements have been set forth in our earnings release and our periodic reports filed with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, or any subsequently filed quarterly reports.

During today's call, we will also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most closely comparable GAAP financial measure are included in the earnings release we issued today, which has been posted on the Investor Relations page of Grindr's website and in Grindr's filings with the SEC. With that, I'll turn it over to George.

George Arison

Thanks, Tolu, and hello, everyone. We delivered another excellent quarter. Revenue grew 22% to $141 million with $62 million in adjusted EBITDA and a 44% adjusted EBITDA margin. We are again raising our 2026 guidance to at least $560 million in revenue and $236 million in adjusted EBITDA. Three things I want to focus on today.

First, we are delivering on the strategy we laid out at our 2024 Investor Day. We said we would turn Grindr into the Global Gayborhood, which would ultimately be a platform of profitable businesses that reinforce one another, starting with a better free app and premium products we're paying more for. Since we've rebuilt the app and chat infrastructure, introduced Right Now and AI-powered recommendations and recently launched Maps, monthly active users have grown 13% since 2024 and users now spend almost 70 minutes a day on Grindr on average. Updated 2026 outlook already puts us within the adjusted EBITDA dollar range we previously set at Investor Day for 2027 and our revenue at roughly 93% of our 2027 Investor Day target, all a year early. This fantastic progress reflects our team's ability to simultaneously overdeliver for our users and our shareholders by creating tremendous value within our core product.

Second, Edge is launching this month. Early access for our new AI-powered premium tier begins November 10 with a global launch on November 17. We are launching Edge at an introductory price of $120 a month. With a premium experience and deliberately limited membership, we have room for substantially higher pricing over time.

With nearly 400,000 users registering for early access within 72 hours of us announcing the ability for users to express an interest, we received another strong data point of Edge being very well set up to be a strong driver of core app revenue growth in 2027 and beyond.

Third, we have completed our acquisition of PurposeMed, Inc., the parent company of the Freddie brand. With premiumization underway and the core business well ahead of our Investor Day plan, we are in a prime position to do more. HIV prevention is directly tied to men meeting through Grindr. Making PrEP easier to access is a natural next step of our evolution.

The acquisition brings a profitable business, an experienced clinical team, nationwide coverage and pharmacy operations that would take at least 2 years to build ourselves. We know Grindr can accelerate Freddie's growth. Through September, almost 1/4 of Freddie's U.S. patients came through Grindr ads that any advertiser could buy. Woodwork showed us that native placements built into the app convert almost 2.5x as well as standard ads.

We validated the effectiveness of native placements for PrEP during diligence and now starting to use them for Freddie. 3 in 4 U.S. Grindr users signing up for Freddie have never used PrEP. We believe we can expand the market itself. We expect approximately 12,000 U.S. patients at the end of the year. Based on our tests, we believe current native placements and new ones we are building can alone take us to 50,000 over the medium term.

At more than $4,800 in revenue per patient per year, 50,000 U.S. patients receiving telehealth and pharmacy services for a full year would generate approximately $240 million in annual revenue. At adjusted EBITDA margins of 40% or higher in the medium term, that is nearly $100 million in annual adjusted EBITDA.

Getting there will take time, including spreading infrastructure costs across more patients, filling more prescriptions through Freddie's affiliated pharmacies and growing the U.S. share of revenue where we expect higher margins than in Canada. Our ambitions go much further. We estimate that bringing 200,000 U.S. gay men onto PrEP for the first time could prevent nearly 4,000 HIV infections annually.

When you think of the opportunity from this point of view, the magnitude of what we are taking on becomes much clearer. Beyond native placements, we plan to offer Freddie patients premium Grindr services and other integrations such as an in-app badge with verified date of your last negative HIV test result or PrEP prescription obtained through Freddie, information shared only with users' consent.

These, we believe, will play a vital role in getting a lot more men who have not tried PrEP before to start the medication. Premium features help users find connections, while verified badges build confidence in profile health information. Both can bring more men into taking care of their health while improving the Grindr experience.

In summary, our priorities for 2027 are threefold. One, integrate Freddie and expanding clinical and affiliated pharmacy capacity to grow U.S. patients; two, rapidly scaling Edge revenue while developing AI products and future premium offerings like VIP; and three, improving Free Grindr to remain the app of choice for gay men.

At our next Investor Day in June 2027, we will share our vision and financial goals through 2030. Our team's execution over the last 4 years gives us the confidence to aim much higher. Thank you to our team and our shareholders. Now over to John.

John North

Thanks, George. We had an excellent third quarter. Revenue grew 22% year-over-year to $141 million, and adjusted EBITDA was $62 million, representing a 44% margin. Performance was driven by sustained momentum in core app revenue as well as solid ads execution.

App-based revenue grew 22% year-over-year to $118 million, supported by steady demand across our XTRA and Unlimited tiers and strong consumables performance. Average paying users grew 11% to 1.4 million and ARPU was up 10% to $27.15. Advertising revenue grew 23% to $24 million, driven by continued strength in direct advertising alongside programmatic growth.

As a reminder, we still expect advertising revenue to land in the mid- to high teens as a percentage of total revenue for full year 2026 before normalizing back to our near-historical 15% range. Reported GAAP net loss was $7 million. This was driven by a onetime $33 million settlement charge related to historical U.K. litigation over data practices prior to 2020, well before the current ownership and management team took over, along with $3 million in transaction costs for Freddie.

Excluding litigation and transaction costs, net income was $21 million. Operating expenses, excluding cost of revenue, were $103 million on a reported basis or $67 million, excluding litigation and transaction costs, compared to $42 million in Q3 of last year. Operating income, excluding litigation and transaction costs, was $40 million or 28% of revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA grew 13% year-over-year to $62 million or a 44% margin. Q3 of last year came in at a 47% margin, benefiting from higher capitalized product development expenses. Our underlying profitability remains very healthy giving us plenty of capacity to invest in our core app and Edge while maintaining strong margins.

Talking about share repurchases, through our structured buyback programs, we completed the repurchase of approximately 13 million shares for $180 million at an average price of $13.83 before excise tax during the 9 months ended September 30, 2026. As part of the Freddie transaction, we funded $60 million of the consideration in equity, which represents about 4 million Grindr shares.

Even with those shares factored in, our buyback activity delivered a net share reduction of roughly 9 million shares or about 5% of our pre-buyback shares outstanding and roughly 19% of our pre-buyback free float. Note also that the shares issued for Freddie have resale restrictions, so they won't immediately enter the freely tradable float.

Now for our guidance. With our strong Q3 results and continued momentum across the core business, we are raising our full year 2026 outlook. We now expect full year 2026 revenue of at least $560 million, up from our previous outlook of approximately $540, million and adjusted EBITDA of at least $236 million, up from approximately $232 million. This outlook includes negligible contribution from Freddie in the fourth quarter following the close.

We are also providing our initial 2027 outlook to help you model the addition of Edge and Freddie. For 2027, we expect total revenue of at least $705 million, representing approximately 26% in implied top-line growth based on our 2026 guidance, and adjusted EBITDA of at least $275 million, which implies an adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 39%.

This fits right within our 39% to 42% Investor Day margin framework even as we make upfront operational investments to scale Freddie's clinical and pharmacy infrastructure in the U.S. While scaling those operations will have a modest impact on consolidated margin percentage next year, we expect Freddie to be accretive to consolidated EBITDA dollars.

At scale, we expect Freddie to deliver adjusted EBITDA margins of at least 40%, comparable to the core business. We will provide a full multiyear update at our Investor Day in June of 2027. Overall, we are very pleased with the underlying business and are well positioned to fund our highest priority growth initiatives while continuing to deliver strong financial results. And with that, operator, please open the call to questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley.

ช่วงถาม-ตอบ

Nathaniel Feather

I appreciate the transparency into '27. Can you just help us unpack a little bit how we should think about the key revenue drivers here and any kind of sense of stack ranking between Edge, Freddie and any other drivers?

George Arison

Nathan, good to talk to you, and thanks for the question. Let me start with strategic for '27, and then we can talk through the details to the extent that we can. We are thinking of three things that matter for next year. Number one, we want to get the acquisition integration right and set Freddie up for tremendous growth in the years to come because we think the potential is massive.

Number two, we want to drive adoption for Edge to be quite high. We are really happy with how things are going so far, getting ready for the launch. But obviously, it's a really big launch for us. And if you think about Edge from a long-term perspective, it's a $100 million to $150 million opportunity on the kind of conservative side of estimates over many years. And so we want to get that right.

And number three, we really want to invest in the free user experience, given how far ahead of the 3-year plan we are, having come in at 93% of the 3-year plan for '27 this year and EBITDA range already being in the range that we had given for 2027. We feel like it's a really great time for us to invest in the long term next year.

So when you think about from that perspective, there are now 3 big revenue drivers inside Grindr with Freddie. Number one, there's the core app and the subscription business plus the add-ons. Number two is the ad business; and number three is Freddie. With the core business, the biggest driver is going to be Edge, and we expect that to do very, very well.

Obviously, we don't break out that as a revenue number, but our expectations are that it's going to perform very strongly. And if I had to break it out kind of probably we will achieve somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of what we want to achieve over the long term with Edge in the first year, and we feel really confident about that.

With the ads business, we're going to have a year that is going to be more moderate than what you've seen in the last few years. We obviously have said this before, but ads should moderate back to being in that 15%, 16% of the total revenue range, which I think we've repeatedly said throughout this year rather than be kind of the 18%, 19% that it is today.

Some of the reasons why ads has done so well is because we actually have been able to achieve a lot of the growth that we had expected for ads in '27 earlier, thanks to team's overperformance. But we have a lot of other investments that we want to make for ads and next year will be a year that we do it. Another reason why ads will moderate is because we're losing approximately $10 million of telehealth direct ads revenue that we generated this year.

So with Freddie coming on board, that revenue won't be available to us, obviously, anymore. And so that is going to moderate ads a little bit as well. Ads will grow, but will not grow at the pace that we would have seen in the past. And we're going to spend the year really investing into new ad formats and into some of our longer-term investments to make the direct business grow faster over the long term. I think medium term, long term, I still believe that there is a significant amount of growth in ads beyond where we are now. We were at $30 million 4 years ago. We are at nearly $100 million now, and I think that there is a path to double or 2.5x that.

And then with Freddie, the way we kind of think of Freddie for this coming year is to really focus on integrating the business. That's going to be a big step for us. We've never done that before as a business. It's our first acquisition, and I think it's really critical to get it right and really focused on expanding our in-house pharmacy capacity and moving as many U.S. patients as possible from third-party pharmacies to our own pharmacies.

And the reason that matters is because that is the key driver to making the unit economics be remarkably better. Obviously, Freddie is already profitable, but for every patient that you have on your pharmacy rather than third-party pharmacy and they stay on with you for a full year, that's about $4,400 -- sorry, that's about $2,400 more revenue a year versus if you're using a third-party pharmacy.

And so while we wouldn't expect every patient to be on the Freddie pharmacies, we want to move as many as we can to that. And then once we are in a place where we think our pharmacy operations are fully built out and have the capacity for a lot more, that will be the right time for us to start driving a lot more traffic into the Freddie experience and getting a lot more new patients.

So the patient volume will increase in 2027, but it will be more moderate pace. But then in '28 and beyond, we would expect the patient volume to grow at a faster pace because, again, we would want to be growing in a very profitable way at maximum unit economics per patient that we can be achieving.

Nathaniel Feather

Yes, that's very helpful. And just a few follow-ups on that last bit. How should we think about the gating factors to expanding the in-house pharmacy? And then any way to think about the timeline there? And then you noted that once that happens, you can accelerate patient growth a little more. How are you thinking about how Freddie shows up in the app near term until you have more of this in-house pharmacy targets achieved?

George Arison

Yes. So all the investments that are necessary for Freddie are already assumed in the guidance that we are giving today. And I do want to highlight the fact that even with a pretty significant investment planned, we're still going to -- at the minimum, we're saying that we're going to deliver what's implied 39% margin, and that's within the threshold that we gave for the 3-year plan in 2024.

The reason we can do that is because we have a very high-margin business coming in next year, which is going to be Edge, and that's going to allow us to also do a significant amount of investments for Freddie while having a margin that we had committed to in the past when we had never envisioned doing something like Freddie at the time.

The -- Freddie already has some pharmacy capacity in the U.S., a reasonable amount. We have a pharmacy in Texas, a pharmacy in California as well. We need to add another -- at least one more pharmacy in the U.S., and there is work already ongoing to do that. And then there's a lot of regulatory kind of pieces to manage there. The pharmacies that Freddie has today are retail pharmacies.

You can utilize those for mail order, but that's not the only thing that they should be doing. We want to be able to get in a situation where we have the ability to do just mail order from a pharmacy location as well, and there's just a bunch of regulatory and BD pieces that need to be managed there, which we are working through today. And that is going to be a key part of that.

I think it's also important to highlight on that piece, Freddie is an operational business. That is very different than what Grindr is used to today. I, for better or worse, have run an operational business before, one with far worse margins than Freddie has. And so I kind of understand the challenges of an operational business from that point of view. And people matter in that business a ton.

And yes, you can have operations and process and structure to ensure that quality experience across the board of people to deliver it. And so it's both the pharmacies themselves, but also the people in the pharmacies, meaning the pharmacists, the techs and ensuring that we are delivering as good of a customer experience as possible is going to be a big focus for next year.

As far as how the Freddie product is going to show up in the app, so to start with, we had built a bunch of different native placements for Woodwork that we are now using for Freddie. About a little over half of those placements are already being utilized for Freddie. And over time, we will switch all of them to be available for Freddie. These are, in effect, advertisements, but they're very natively built into the product and make a lot more sense to the user.

We also have a health center, which you can access in the app as well. And there, Freddie is now going to take a leading position because it's going to be messaged around, hey, get PrEP and you can get PrEP directly from there. Today, you still get sent out to the Freddie website to go through the process of getting PrEP prescriptions there, but we want to actually integrate that fully into the Grindr app, so you don't have to leave the app at all and can do it all within our experience.

And we also are working on creating a bunch of new placements. For example, adding a placement for an ED medication on a person's profile probably didn't make sense. It wouldn't feel very native. But on the Grindr profile, each individual user is able to say, I'm on PrEP. Well, in that space, having a placement that allows a person who is looking at your profile to also click on a button and get PrEP is a very native thing. It makes a ton of sense.

And so we're going to build new placements like that across the app to have more places where we're educating people on both you should be on PrEP and here's PrEP available directly through the Grindr experience. That's all going to be kind of coming not in too distant future in 2027. There are a few pieces beyond that, that we want to do that's going to take a little bit longer.

We want to be able to have verified badges on a person's profile if they have done an HIV test with Freddie and/or if they have received a Freddie prescription as well. And we believe having -- giving people the option to choose to show that information on the app, obviously, it's going to be all with user consent, will make their profiles a lot more interesting to people.

A very large number of people on Grindr already say whether they are HIV positive or negative on the profile, but that's self-reported. Now think about that whether if it's actually verified, hey, we know that they had a test on this date, and these were the test results. Again, that would only be done with user consent, but showing that information on the profile will make the profile be a lot more relevant to people and a lot more trustworthy to the other users that are seeing it.

That's an added benefit to the user. It's also an added benefit to also promoting the fact that any other user can have a similar type of profile if they go through an HIV test process with Freddie. So that is going to be something that's going to take a little bit longer to build out because there is a lot of data integrity management that needs to happen between the Grindr side and the Freddie side, and we're starting to work on that, but we'll need a little bit more time.

And then the last thing that we're envisioning is giving Freddie patients access to Grindr premium products and features as part of their Freddie prescription or as part of their visit with the doctor, right? So if you have a visit with a Freddie doctor, then you also can get Grindr premium access at the same time. That's something that also will take time to build out and integrate.

There is a lot of data kind of management to do in that regard as well, but that is something that we are envisioning also. The way to think about this is if you do a survey of Grindr users, making sure that they are managing properly for the HIV risk is among the most important things that people care about.

And so I believe that vast majority of Grindr users are going to be very comfortable and very supportive of us utilizing as much of the app as we can to educate more people to be on PrEP and to get people to be compliant with staying on their PrEP medications because this is something that matters both to the individual who is on PrEP and for that person's health, but also for the PrEP of all the other men that are on Grindr looking to connect.

And so that is actually why the two businesses make so much sense together. And we certainly are going to be using the Grindr app in a very powerful way to both educate people to be on PrEP and hey, here's a direct access to PrEP in a very simple way within the app that you're using for an hour a day.

Operator

Our next question will come from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Eric Sheridan

Maybe sort of a two-parter. With Edge, you've got the number around early access registrations. How are you thinking about registrations converting into users against wanting to strike a balance and there being a cap on Edge more broadly? That's number one. And number two, you talked a little bit about a VIP tier, some future product iterations in the materials. How are we thinking about Edge as a jumping off point to more tiering and different levels of pricing elasticity for the business over the long term?

George Arison

Thanks, Eric, and great to talk to you. I think these are great questions. I appreciate them. Let me start with the very last of what you said, which is pricing elasticity. We raised prices fairly markedly this year, about 20% across the board. And so virtually no churn in terms of users churning off the experience. Quite frankly, it was better than even we had expected or tested into it.

And so I think that tells you that there is quite a bit of pricing elasticity power in the product. And I'm not saying we're going to raise prices again in the immediate term. That is totally not the plan. I think one of the reasons why that worked so well is because we had created a ton of value in the tiers over time. And then we raised prices. So people were much more comfortable like, wait, I'm getting a lot more out of this tier. It's reasonable for it to be a little bit more expensive. And so we will focus on adding more value in the 2027 period and then revisit where the pricing should be on the current tiers beyond that.

Now with going to Edge's point, we are really happy with the registrations that we have seen in the preregistration period. This is -- we told people, if you are interested in having early access, which is going to come on November 10, please register here. And so then people gave us their registration information through that path. And demand was tremendous.

We had estimated maybe we'd get about 100,000 people over a 7-day period. And instead, we got 400,000 registrations in a 72-hour window and more since. And so that was really awesome. When we think about how big Edge can potentially be, we're really kind of circling around somewhere between 1% to 2/3 of 1% of our MAU.

If we achieve 2/3 of 1% of MAU at the current price that we are starting Edge with, which is $120, that is a $150 million revenue opportunity, assuming that person stays with Edge for a full year. So even kind of on that low-end calculation with a lower-end price that we are launching with, you're already building an amazing business that is extremely high margin as well.

At this point, our view is that we're going to hard cap it at no more than 1% of our MAU for now. Now obviously, long term, if we feel like there's room to increase that, we could, but that's going to be the approach that we take. We do not expect to be at 2/3 of 1% in year 1, right? That would be too much to achieve in 1 year. But if we could do something like 20% to 30% of that in the first year of it being live, we would be very happy with that outcome.

And I would call that a complete home run as far as what we would like to see from Edge. We believe that we can do it based on the testing that we've done so far. And the reason we launched the price that we did, even though we could have gone at a higher price and testing data supported a higher price, is because we wanted to have a lot of demand, get a lot of excitement for this and then have pricing power in the future to either move to longer-term plans like 2 months, 3 months at a time or to move to a higher price point at a later date.

With regards to VIP, this is something that we are working on and have been for a while. Edge is not the highest price point that we're envisioning for Grindr. This VIP product is something that we're envisioning beyond that. Now that's going to be limited to a much smaller cohort of people. We're truly thinking like a VIP experience that is going to combine in-app features with off-app experiences.

One of the things that struck me in user research and talking to people, I host dinners with what you would view as kind of long-term VIP customers of Grindr on a regular basis is people are really excited about the opportunity to have in-person engagement with people like them that might not be in their normal business network, but have a lot of other similarities to them and their lifestyles.

And that can be people going to events together. It can be that we host parties for them, et cetera. So there'll be a lot of off-app experiences that we are envisioning for the VIP tier. As an example, in January, we are hosting a very select group of people for an event at Aspen Ski Week. It's going to be for a pretty small cohort of people, but it's kind of our experimentation of getting into these very high-end VIP events and activities.

So our vision for a VIP product is going to have this offline component. And then it's going to have an online component inside the app where they're going to get features similar to Edge, but even more powerful than what you have in Edge. And there will also be the group of people that will be getting a lot of our features first -- and then once they've, kind of, fully permeated and used them a lot, then we might then make it be available for the Edge tier as well.

We believe that between these two things, in-app features and off-app features, the price point for VIP can be far, far higher than what we are envisioning for Edge. Now again, for a very small cohort of people is kind of what we are envisioning here. And I'm really excited about this product. It's something that, frankly, I've thought about for a few years now, and it's really fun to now be in a place where you're actually getting it to market and start engaging users with it.

There's not a big revenue assumption for VIP in 2027. Frankly, there's 0 in the guidance that we're giving, but it is going to be something that we want to be in as good of a position for growth in 2028 as Edge is today for 2027.

Operator

Our next question will come from Andrew Marok with Raymond James.

Andrew Marok

So in the shareholder letter and in the script, you called out the 3 priorities of Grindr Health, Edge and Grindr app. You've talked a bit before about how you like to have a given year's product development kind of prepared in advance and well in the pipe. So how do you feel about the state of the 2027 core road map at this point so that Health and Edge rollouts can maybe take up a little bit more focus?

George Arison

Well, we've -- I think we've made a lot of great progress on the core product road map for 2027. I do want to say we're giving guidance a quarter early. And normally, the way we do things is we put a bunch of stuff in testing in the kind of September, October timeline that are going to be revenue drivers for 2020 -- for the next year, right? So we did that this year as well.

A bunch of stuff went into testing in September, October, November. And the results on that are not yet available, right, because they're still in testing today. And so giving guidance a quarter early put us in a position where we don't have full visibility yet into the core app revenue drivers. Obviously, we have a visibility into the really big one, which is Edge, but some of the other stuff is not yet assumed because we don't have visibility into that yet. So that still is on the come. And yes, it's only 2 more months left in the year, but that's still a big percentage of the total period when you get to do this kind of testing.

In terms of what we want to work on for next year on the core side, we have a very good plan, I think, and we're really excited about that. Historically, if you look back the last 6 years, a really big portion of Grindr's engineering capacity was focused on either premium products and freemium products where we would be making money or in redoing the architectural components of the app that were causing users significant challenges, including rewriting the chat infrastructure, rewriting the back end completely, rewriting the front end nearly completely.

All of that is now complete. And the data infrastructure is also built out inside the app and on our back end. The result of that is our crash rates are down massively. The bugs in the app are down in a dramatic manner, and this is all very clear to users because I hear about it from them all the time. And that's really fantastic. But that's going to free up a pretty significant amount of resourcing that we can now use for product development as well for new product development.

And then one big difference between next year and previous years is that we're going to really focus a bigger portion of the team on product development for the free user and things that just make sense for the free user, whether or not they make sense for premiumization or paid products will be determined in the future. We want to build products that free users will love and will use a lot. And then we will think about how to monetize those, if at all, later on.

One of my kind of learnings over the last 4 years that we probably went to monetization of Right Now too fast. Right Now has captured a really fantastic user base. They're using it all the time, but we probably should have kept it freer for longer than we did because I think it would have made the product even better than it already has been. And so we want to be in a place where we are building a lot of things for the free user and getting them to use them for a long time. And through that, ensuring that we protect the Grindr moat and protect Grindr as the app of choice for gay men in the U.S. and around the world. So hopefully, that answers the question, Andrew.

Andrew Marok

Yes, very helpful. And maybe one more, if I could. I mean you've been one of the biggest proponents of AI usage, I think, in our coverage space and certainly one of the ones who has been -- put the most numbers around how it's helped engineer productivity and things like that. With some of the recent advances in AI tools, what are you seeing maybe over the last 3 to 6 months that have been some of the biggest unlocks for your internal teams using AI? And how do you think that, that sets you up for '27?

George Arison

Yes. We are super happy, honestly, with the -- what the engineering team has been doing with that, and we're continuing to see massive improvements in how much productivity they're gaining. The way I answer this question regularly now is like when I joined Grindr about 6 or 9 months into it, I met with -- for like a mentorship meeting with a retiring CEO of a very large tech company.

And I told them kind of what I'm envisioning for the next 3, 4 years. And I'm like, I think I'll need somewhere between 150 and 200 engineers in 2026 to do all the things that I want us to do at the time. And he looked at me like, no, you won't. You'll be fine with about 60 to 70. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Even at 150 to 200 people, that's like a super lean team because revenue is going to grow so much.

And he kept insisting like, no, you won't. And his rationale was it's because the things I'm seeing coming down the pike, having just been inside some of the AI labs and companies at the forefront of this that are not yet publicly known, but will come in a year or 2, the amount of product that you're going to have from engineering is just going to be fundamentally different.

And so when you think about that conversation and think about it today, he was right and I was right. I actually would have needed a 100 to 250 person team to do the stuff that we're doing, and that makes sense. But we are able to do it with about 60 people on the product engineering side. So we have more engineers than 60, but product engineers are roughly 60. And it's because each engineer today is roughly 2.5 to 3x more productive than they were a year or 18 months ago. And that's pretty remarkable.

Now there are things to be cautious about or to manage for. Number one is bugs and kind of risks that the AI created code might put into the product. And that's something that we are managing very thoughtfully and carefully, and it's very much top of mind for our engineering leadership. I got an e-mail about what we're going to be doing about it actually today from the team. And so that's, I think, really important.

And the other big factor is security. The risks around data security and your infrastructure security are greater today because of AI than they have ever been, not because of anything you might be doing on your side, but because bad actors can use AI to attack you in ways that previously were not possible. And so that's the other big top-of-mind topic for us in terms of what to do really well and ensure that we protect the Grindr users as much as possible. So you have to balance the benefits that you're getting from AI with these two other factors at the same time.

The last thing I'll mention is where I think really big opportunities are, and I hope people are working on these outside of Grindr is giving teams outside of engineering the tooling that they need to also be able to increase their productivity at a similar pace. One of the things we are finding at Grindr today is that engineers are so far ahead of everybody else that the rest of the organization cannot keep up with them at the pace that it needs to, especially on the product and the design side.

And part of that is because the technology is not yet there for product and for design to be able to use AI in the same way, but it's starting to be there more. We've recently introduced some new tools into the Grindr ecosystem for engineers. One in particular is called Devin. And with Devin, now we can be in a place where our designers are going to start using that and our PMs are going to start using that as well to actually produce code also. So we're pretty psyched about that as well.

Operator

Our final question will come from Andrew Boone with Citizens JMP.

Timothy Juang

This is Tim on for Andrew. I wanted to ask more about Freddie. Could you talk about what it takes to move patients from third-party pharmacies onto owned pharmacies? What does that process look like? And secondly, on the $4,800 per U.S. patient figure, what does the split look like between pharmacy and reimbursement revenue and the telehealth and lab fee?

George Arison

Absolutely. Well, moving a patient to which pharmacy is actually quite simple from the operational point of view, meaning like we can decide where the prescription goes. What's important is having actual pharmacy capacity to do that, and that means having pharmacies in place, having those pharmacies be staffed in a proper way and having the business development done and the regulatory things done to send prescriptions to people in the right place, wherever it is that they want to receive those prescriptions, right?

So we have a pharmacy in California. We have a pharmacy in Texas. We're still going to have a pharmacy in New York as well. And then we need to make sure that these pharmacies are able to do as much mail order as we need them to do in order to fill the needs of what the customers kind of have in terms of their locations. And so it's more of a I guess, operational like get it in place process versus picking whether you're sending somebody to a third-party pharmacy or a Freddie affiliated pharmacy.

With regards to the revenue split, I think you can assume roughly 50-50 between pharmacy and telehealth. I think maybe 60-40 would be the place that I would position you to. So 60% on the telehealth side and 40% on the pharmacy side.

Operator

This completes the allotted time for questions. I will now turn the call back over to George Arison for any closing remarks.

George Arison

Well, thank you, everybody, for joining. Really excited for the quarter that we had and happy to be giving guidance a quarter early for what is going to be a really amazing year for Grindr in 2027.

Operator

Thank you for joining Grindr's Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. You may now disconnect.