CHEEX

CHEEX review — 6/10, 4 trackers detected

CHEEX is a different animal from everything else in this review batch. It's a venture-capital-backed startup. Denise Kratzenberg and Maximilian Horwitz founded it in Berlin in early 2020, launched the platform in June that year, closed a seven-figure seed round in April 2021, and had 100,000 subscribers by January 2022. Revenue reportedly reached the millions. Investors include Claire Davidson (founder of Urbanara) and Wefox co-founder Fabian Wesemann. This isn't a filmmaker with a camera and a WordPress site. This is a tech company that happens to make ethical porn.

And that distinction shows up everywhere — both positively and negatively.

The positive: the platform experience is the best of any ethical porn site I've reviewed. When you sign up, you get an onboarding questionnaire — what kind of person are you, why are you here, do you want education or entertainment, soft or intense. Based on your answers, the platform curates a starting point. The design was overhauled in October 2022 by Plusminus Studio (also Berlin) with a visual language that's deliberately playful — peach logos, fruit sticker illustrations, frosted-glass body photography that gets past social media restrictions while still feeling distinctly like an adult brand. Navigation is clean. Content is organized into Watch, Listen, Learn, and Live sections. It feels like a product built by people who've used Netflix and Spotify, not people who learned web design in 2005.

The content mix is the broadest in this review batch. Films span categories from sensual couples to group scenes to BDSM — all produced under CHEEX's ethical guidelines (fair pay, STD testing, consent protocols, performer involvement in concept). Audio erotica offers male and female narrators across different scenarios. The magazine section covers sex education, identity, relationships. And then there's the Pleasure Academy.

The Pleasure Academy is the single most distinctive feature any ethical porn site offers. Tutorial porn — where performers demonstrate specific sexual techniques while educators break down each step. How to give oral sex. How to explore anal. How to communicate with a partner about new things. These aren't awkward instructional videos with diagrams. They're explicit content that happens to be educational, directed by Anneli von Klitzing. It's a format that mainstream porn occasionally stumbles into, but CHEEX built an entire structured curriculum around it. Live workshops take this further — real-time sessions on shibari, non-penetrative sex, relationship rebuilding. Interactive, not pre-recorded.

The Blacklight scan is where CHEEX loses the plot. 4 trackers and 1 cookie. For context: Lustery came back 0/0. Erika Lust 2/0. FrolicMe 2/0. Bright Desire 1/1. Sssh 1/0. CHEEX at 4/1 is the heaviest tracking footprint of any ethical porn site in this project. No fingerprinting, no session recording, no keystroke capture — so it's not as invasive as mainstream tubes. But for a platform that explicitly markets itself as a "safe space" and charges premium prices, running more trackers than any competitor in your category is a contradiction. The trackers are likely a combination of analytics, marketing attribution, and possibly investor reporting metrics. VC-backed companies track user behavior more aggressively because they need data for board presentations and fundraising narratives.

VirusTotal came back 0/94. Clean on malware. The tracking concern is about data collection practices, not security threats.

Pricing: €19.90 per month, or €9.90 per month billed annually at €118.80. The monthly price is high — only Lustery's $25 is more expensive. The annual plan at €9.90 is competitive with Erika Lust and Lustery's annuals. There's often a 7-day free trial with the annual subscription via promo codes. Gift cards are available through shop.getcheex.com — one of the few ethical porn sites where you can gift a subscription without putting someone's credit card on file.

The library size is the main value concern. CHEEX launched in 2020. Even with weekly updates, the catalog is still building. I'd estimate 50-100+ original films plus curated licensed content. Compare that to FrolicMe's 500+ across nine years, or Sssh's 269 across twenty-six years. The Pleasure Academy content and audio stories add depth, but if you're purely here for films, you might cycle through the catalog faster than the subscription renews.

The elephant in the room: venture capital. Every other site in this review batch is independently owned. Ms Naughty runs Bright Desire with her husband. Anna Richards runs FrolicMe solo. Angie Rowntree has operated Sssh for 26 years without outside investors. Paulita Pappel built Lustery independently. CHEEX has institutional money behind it. That's not inherently bad — the funding is why the platform is so polished and the content mix is so broad. But VC money comes with growth expectations. Users become metrics. Content decisions get filtered through what scales. Whether CHEEX can maintain its ethical commitments under investor pressure is a question that doesn't apply to any other site here.

6.0/10. The platform is the best-designed in the category and the Pleasure Academy is genuinely innovative. The live workshops and tutorial porn fill a niche nobody else touches. But the Blacklight scan at 4 trackers is the worst privacy result of any ethical porn site reviewed, the monthly price is high for a still-growing library, and the VC funding introduces dynamics that merit skepticism from privacy-conscious users. The annual plan with the free trial is the way to test it.

⚖️ Compare CHEEX vs

Payment Methods