Once an anal OnlyFans darling, Stella Barey’s now a direct competitor. Barey, 28, is known online as “Anal Princess,” and she made a small fortune off the adults-only platform. Apparently, her kink is biting, because she’s turned around and bitten the hand that fed her. She’s coding her own OnlyFans alternative, calling it Hidden. According to Stella, she’s building Hidden to be a platform made by sex workers who are done crossing their fingers and hoping that cross-promoting their content will result in subscriptions.
Stella Barey is a 28-year-old U.S.-born creator who hit OnlyFans like a social hurricane. After a few viral TikToks, she began clocking six-figure months. Her brand has been blunt from the get-go. Think: part feminist manifesto, part “wanna see me do butt stuff? Subscribe!” However, her success came with a price. Barey found herself facing problems familiar to so many content creators: exhaustion, endless DMs from subscribers who may or may not be respecting boundaries, and the never-ending algorithm roulette. Barey decided that what she needed was power, not permission to run her own business. Enter Hidden.
Hidden launched in April 2025, is sex-worker-founded, and has a lower revenue cut than OnlyFans (18% instead of 20%). It comes with a “For You” feed similar to TikTok and allows some content banned on OnlyFans (pee play, fisting, etc.). The vibe is sort of like if you could buy ethical porn on Etsy, with resale shops, passive income, and fewer rules about what body parts can exist online behind a paywall. There’s also an anti-theft bot in the works, making it easier for creators to ensure their content is protected. In theory, Hidden is working to reduce burnout by letting content do the work for creators rather than the other way around.
Despite the name, Hidden is being anything but discreet about its target audience: Gen Z sex workers. Gen Z sex workers aren’t here just to join any new platform that’ll let them post lewd selfies. They’re here to build their own social spaces, and Hidden promises to let them do exactly that. Hidden’s feed is similar to the social media apps where Gen Z prefers to exist, but its heart is in indie-porn rebellion. We’re talking about the generation that unionized Starbucks, so think of a platform built around ethical porn, transparency, and autonomy being the driving factors rather than capitalism.
However, there are some potential pitfalls for Hidden that Stella’s going to have to figure out. For one thing, they’ve already encountered banking and payment challenges—because if banks don’t like your business, your morals matter not one iota to Visa. OnlyFans already has a user base the size of a small country, and getting fans to migrate is going to go over about as well as that one time people decided to give Mastodon a try (remember that clunky Twitter alternative?). The branding surrounding “ethical porn” sounds all fine and good, but morality rarely covers hosting fees, and even the most well-intentioned platforms can break under the weight of bureaucracy, burnout, and wonky payment processors.
Regardless of whether Hidden succeeds in the uphill battle to be an actual competitor to OnlyFans and Fansly, the message behind its building is coming through loud and clear: sex work is valid work, and those workers deserve safety tools, fair pay, and fewer middlemen. Whether you’re coding your own hosting platform or selling access to bikini pics on one that already exists, boundaries are important and should be honored. Stella Barey’s endeavor isn’t just about who gets naked for money online. It’s about who gets the authority to decide how they do it.