There’s a certain kind of dating dealbreaker that no amount of chemistry survives: your date can’t stand your dog. Anyone who has watched a promising relationship curdle over a partner quietly resenting the animal on the couch knows the feeling. A little over a swipe-happy decade ago, a pair of sisters decided that feeling was a business.
The pitch was genuinely smart
Leigh and Casey Isaacson launched Dig, a dating app built expressly for dog lovers, on Valentine’s Day in 2018. The premise was tidy: filter for the dog thing up front, and you skip the heartbreak of discovering incompatibility three months in. It caught on well enough that the sisters ran the same play for the other side of the pet aisle, spinning up Tabby for cat people.
And the underlying insight really was sharp. When you talk about your animal, you’re not just talking about your animal. You’re revealing how you spend your money, how much time you give to something dependent on you, how tidy your home is, how often you travel, what you consider non-negotiable. A pet is a remarkably efficient shortcut to the stuff that actually determines whether two lives fit together. As a filter, “must love dogs” is doing more work than it looks like it’s doing.
The business was another story
A good insight and a durable company are not the same thing, and this is where the story turns. Tabby made it onto ABC’s Shark Tank in the show’s thirteenth season and landed a deal with Kevin O’Leary, reportedly $300,000 for a 30 percent stake. National TV, a celebrity investor, a clean concept: on paper, it should have flown.
It didn’t. The app was dogged by buggy software and rough user reviews, the kind of friction that’s fatal in a category where people have infinite alternatives and zero patience. Tabby was eventually pulled from Apple’s App Store and wound down around the end of 2022. Dig, the original dog-lover app, faded out as well. The niche pet-dating experiment, for now, is over.
Why standalone pet apps are so hard
Dig and Tabby ran into the same wall that flattens most niche dating apps: the network problem. A dating app is only as good as the number of plausible matches near you, and slicing the dating pool down to “single dog people within 20 miles who are also on this specific app” makes that pool very shallow, very fast. A big-city user might find a crowd; everyone else opens the app to tumbleweeds. Add the brutal economics of the category, where giants spend fortunes on marketing and users bounce at the first glitch, and a small, single-purpose app is fighting uphill the whole way.
There’s a cruel irony in it, too. The better your filter, the smaller your pool, so the very thing that made the pitch appealing also made the app harder to sustain.
Where pet-based dating actually lives now
Here’s the twist: the idea didn’t die, it just moved. The mainstream apps absorbed it. Today the big players let you put your pet front and center, with dedicated pet prompts, “do you have pets” fields, and profile space practically designed for a photo of you and your dog looking wholesome. You get the compatibility signal Dig was built around without the empty-pool problem, because the matching pool is everyone.
So the practical advice, if you’re single and want a partner who’ll love your animal as much as you do, isn’t to hunt for a resurrected niche app. It’s to make your pet a real part of your profile wherever you already are. Lead with the dog. Mention the cat’s tyrannical morning schedule. Say plainly that a future with you is a future with an animal in it. You’ll do exactly what Dig and Tabby promised, screen for the people who are genuinely on board, on platforms big enough to actually deliver a match.
The apps built just for pet people were early to a real truth about how we date. They just proved it works best baked into the tools everyone already uses.
