TL;DR
- Cameo launches new birthday reminder app Candl amid financial struggles
- The app offers basic calendar syncing, astrology features, and gift suggestions
- Cameo’s valuation has dropped over 90%, and it still faces unresolved FTC penalties
- Candl’s simplicity contrasts sharply with the company’s once-ambitious growth plans
- User engagement metrics suggest declining brand relevance despite a slight rebound in app installs
Candl: A Modest Attempt at Relevance
Nearly a year after its valuation collapsed by over 90%, Cameo, the celebrity shoutout platform once considered a tech unicorn, has introduced Candl, a minimalist birthday planning app that feels more like a side project than a strategic pivot.
Candl is now available for free on the App Store and is targeted at users who consistently forget important birthdays. The app pulls data from your phone contacts and builds a custom birthday calendar, sending reminders ahead of upcoming celebrations.
In a lighthearted twist, it also shows zodiac compatibility with friends and family. The upcoming rollout of AI-powered gift recommendations hints at modest innovation, though overall functionality remains basic.
A Privacy Trade-Off?
One of Candl’s few standout features is the “Birthday Network,” which shares birthday information across users who have mutual contacts. If a friend of yours is also on Candl and doesn’t know someone’s birthday, the app fills in the gaps—provided that someone else in their contact list already submitted that information.
For users uncomfortable with this data-sharing mechanism, Cameo offers an opt-out process, allowing individuals to withhold their birthday from the shared network by registering their number.
While practical, this feature raises data privacy concerns and reinforces perceptions that Candl is more reactive than revolutionary.
Once Ambitious, Now Playing Catch-Up
Cameo was once among the pandemic-era’s most buzzed-about platforms. Its experiments with NFT-based communities and creator monetization tools suggested a company eager to expand beyond simple video greetings. But these initiatives largely fizzled out, and Candl feels like a scaled-down attempt to regain lost users.
Despite the app’s usefulness, the launch reads as a stopgap — not the disruptive product the company once promised.
Cameo by the Numbers
| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2024 H1 | 2025 H1 |
| Annual App Installs | 1.1 million | 433,000 | 217,000 | 270,000 (+24%) |
| Gross Consumer Spending | — | — | $4.7 million | $1.7 million (↓64%) |
| FTC Fine (Unpaid) | — | — | $600,000 | Still Outstanding |
| Valuation Decline (Est.) | — | ↓90% | — | — |
Too Little, Too Late?
While there is certainly a need for lightweight, user-friendly birthday reminder tools, it’s puzzling that a company like Cameo—known for premium, creator-driven content—would place its comeback strategy behind a feature that Apple, Google, and Facebook already offer in various forms.
Even with the upcoming AI gift suggestion feature, Candl will face an uphill battle to distinguish itself in a saturated app ecosystem.
“This isn’t the moonshot people expected,” said one analyst. “It’s a calendar app with confetti.”
Slight Uptick Doesn’t Mask Overall Decline
App intelligence firm Appfigures reports a 24% year-over-year increase in downloads for the first half of 2025. That small bounce — 270,000 downloads so far this year — marks the first time Cameo has seen positive app growth since 2021.
However, revenue tells a different story: global consumer spending in the app dropped 64% year-over-year, down from $4.7 million to $1.7 million in the same period.
This disconnect suggests that users may be trying Candl and other Cameo features out of curiosity, but fewer are converting into paying customers.
