PERIOD. in Het Financieele Dagblad: cycle apps, millions raised, and intimate data

On 17 July 2026, Dutch financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad (FD) published a long piece on the cycle app industry, headlined "Sex, back pain and menstruation: cycle apps raise millions on intimate information". The article is about how international period apps are pulling in enormous investment rounds, and why that raises questions, because the "information" those millions are built on is unusually intimate: sex, pain, cycles, fertility.

PERIOD. is mentioned in the piece as the Dutch, privacy-first alternative. Being featured in the FD, one of the most important business newspapers in the Netherlands, confirms something we've said since day one: the way most cycle apps make money is an economic story, not a wellness story.

What the FD wrote about

The gist: the world's biggest cycle apps have become billion-dollar businesses. Not because millions of women pay for subscriptions, but because menstrual, sexual and fertility data is extraordinarily valuable to advertisers, data brokers and insurers. Earlier reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Privacy International and the US FTC has shown users usually don't know what happens with that data, and the consequences can be serious when it turns up somewhere else.

We've been having this conversation for a while now, with Het Parool, VICE, BNR, and now the FD. Every time a major newsroom picks it up, it becomes a little more normal to ask: what actually happens with my data?

Why we're different

Privacy isn't a marketing feature at PERIOD. it's the foundation of the product:

• 🔒 Everything sits on EU servers, under GDPR.
• 🛡️ No ads, no data brokers, no "anonymised" resale.
• 💸 Free, no paywall on tracking your cycle, symptoms, phases or predictions.
• 🤖 AI only with explicit consent, and your conversations aren't used to train models.
• 🇳🇱 Dutch and independent, no VC pressure to turn your data into revenue.

The full breakdown is in our privacy policy and in Privacy at PERIOD. vs. other cycle apps. If you want to see our story and team: About PERIOD.

What we make of it

The fact that a business newspaper, not primarily a health outlet, is picking this up shows the conversation on intimate health data is maturing. It isn't only a privacy topic any more. It's an economic question: who profits from women's bodies, and who gave permission for that?

We built PERIOD. because we think the answer should be "you", and nobody else.

Read the piece

The full article (paywalled, in Dutch) is at fd.nl.

Want to see how PERIOD. works? Download it from the App Store or Play Store.