What Is Coffee Meets Bagel?
Are you tired of dating apps full of people only looking for casual flings or hookups? Luckily, the Coffee Meets Bagel founders created an app tailored to folks with serious relationships in mind. You may have heard of it after it was featured on the TV show Shark Tank. It is a dating service that gives you a curated list of matches each day. So, instead of swiping through hundreds of profiles based on only their profile picture, you're forced to consider each match you're shown.
This Coffee Meet Bagel review will cover the pros and cons of using CMB, the login process, the quality of other singles on the app, and how to complete your profile fully. We'll give you a rundown of the best features, how they work, and how much it'll cost you to use the dating app. Finally, we'll let you know how safe it is, answer FAQs, and give our final rating.
Pros
View personalized daily matches instead of swiping through hundreds of profiles.
Match, chat, and use the Coffee Meet Bagel app for free.
Caters to serious daters.
Women outnumber men on the app.
Activity reports allow you to gauge your chances with a potential match.
Cons
The app can be buggy.
Some complaints about fake profiles.
Small userbase.
No profile verification.
All chats expire in 7 days.
Login Process
The Coffee Meets Bagel dating app can be downloaded from the iOS or Android app stores. There are two ways to sign up: connecting your Facebook account or using your mobile number. If you connect using Facebook, you'll need to select your account and enter your password; your Facebook name and photo will be used. If you use your mobile number, you'll be texted an OTP, and you must manually enter your details and photo.
If you use your mobile number, you'll be prompted to enter:
Your first and last name. It's unusual to be asked for your full name, but it's to "foster a more authentic community," and your last name won't be shared publicly.
Email address
Your Gender (man or woman)
The gender you are interested in (Men, women, or both)
Date of birth
The following steps include granting the app permission to access your location to display nearby matches and enabling notifications to alert you about new matches or messages. You are prompted to upload photos, with a requirement to add at least one and a maximum of nine pictures of yourself. Additionally, you'll answer a few brief questions regarding your highest level of education, school, job title, height, ethnicity, and religion.
Finally, you'll get more specific about the partner you seek to help give you better daily suggested matches. With a free account, you can indicate their gender, age range, distance range, ethnicity, religious belief, and what kind of relationship they're seeking. With Premium, you can also specify a height range, education level, marital status, whether they have/want kids or not, and whether they're a drinker or smoker.
Profile Completion
After registering, your profile is about 60% complete. To fully optimize your profile, you'll need to add some prompts, have nine photos, and complete a few more details on your profile page. You will also see an icebreaker section, where you are encouraged to share fun facts about yourself, which will be used later to jumpstart chats with matches. You have free reign on what fun facts to share, although there are some ideas to inspire you.
Prompts are phrases/questions that you can answer about yourself. Depending on how you answer, they can reveal your killer wit, awesome sense of humor, or any other aspect of your personality. Some of the Coffee Meets Bagel prompts include "What flavor bagel are you and why?", "What could you give a TED talk about with zero preparation?" and "My ideal date."
Finally, you can complete the quick questions on your profile page. You gave your age, religion, ethnicity, and education level during registration. Now, you'll need to answer more questions, including:
Personality traits
Values
Interests
Spoken Languages
You can also specify your relationship goals and current status, family intentions, whether you already have children, and your exercise, smoking, and drinking habits.
User Account Quality
One of the defining features of CMB is that it aims to create genuine and long-lasting relationships between users; it's more for long-term relationships and marriages than flings or hookups. Typically, on sites that are more focused on serious relationships, profiles are more extended and in-depth, which tends to put off casual daters. So, the typical Coffee Meets Bagel profile is well-filled out, has a good number of pictures, and takes the process seriously.
One downside is that CMB is still a smaller dating app, so you'll find that dating pools are minor in rural areas, and you'll run out of potential matches faster. The closer you are to a bigger city, the more people you'll find.
The site uses an algorithm to show you a select number of prime 'bagels' daily, which are your personalized matches. This algorithm is based on your and your partner's preferences and the information it gathers about your type (the people you pay attention to and like as you use the app).
Dating Features
Daily Suggested Bagels
A great feature of Coffee Meets Bagels is that each day at midday, you'll get presented with some personalized matches, or as CMB calls them, "bagels." These suggested profiles are personalized for you based on your match preferences, and you can look through their profiles and indicate yes or no. You need to deal with each profile before you can move on to the next potential match.
This alternative to the endless swiping of other apps can be very appealing to those with "swiping fatigue," where endless lines of profile pictures can lose novelty quite quickly. This forces you to slow down and really consider the person you're looking at, which can lead to you meeting someone that you might've overlooked before. This is why putting effort into your profile prompts and the rest of your profile is important.
Send Coffee Meets Bagel Flowers in the Discover Tab
If you want to see more than your suggested bagels, you can explore the Discover Tab. If you find a profile you like, you can send them a flower. This will notify the other person and allow them to view your profile, even if you're both free users (free users can't view normal likes, only flowers). Flowers cost beans to use—385 beans each time.
This will hopefully cause them to take a good look at your profile, which can increase your chances of getting a like in return because we're inclined to like people who we know already like us. Some recent Coffee Meets Bagel reviews indicate that the flowers feature is buggy. It either doesn't send or doesn't allow receivers to view the sender's profile.
Activity Reports
The activity report is very useful to serious daters. It's an infographic visible at the bottom of profiles but can only be fully viewed if you have a premium subscription. It contains information on how often the person chats with their matches, sends the first message, whether they've been online in the last three days, and how long it usually takes them to reply.
This can show you if the person is a genuine user of the app or if they're just swiping for an ego boost. For serious daters, this can show you at a glance if the person is worth reaching out to. Or, if you're not getting a reply, it could be helpful to know that they rarely reply to matches, always take long to reply, or even that they haven't been online recently.
However, as useful as this information could be, we also find it a little creepy. We all know that apps gather this kind of information about us, but it's unusual for them to offer this information to other app users for a fee. It's not a huge issue because it's just stats on how you use the app, but it does make you feel like you're being watched.
Boost and Skip the Line
If you're not satisfied with your number of matches or likes, you can use a Coffee Meets Bagel Boost. Boosting your profile will put it closer to the front of people's discover queues, which could get you 5x more profile views and up to 3x more matches. Boosting costs 750 beans and lasts until the next noon cycle.
There was also a feature called Skip the Line, similar to Boost. It allows you to be viewed before other users. This pushes you to the front of their likes list so that instead of waiting for them to deal with everyone who's liked them before you, they'd see your profile much earlier.
Note: This feature was recently removed.
Prices & Costs
CMB earns revenue through selling premium subscriptions and beans to users. While the app is free to use, some users online are suggesting that the creators are reducing free functions to nudge free users into buying premium, to make more money. With a Coffee Meets Bagel free account, users can view and like their daily picks, and send them messages.
Coffee Meets Bagel Premium
A Coffee Meets Bagel subscription comes with several perks, including:
Access to the Premium Preferences.
Unlimited Daily picks/suggestions.
See your list of Coffee Meets Bagel secret admirers (who've liked you).
8 Flowers and 1 Boost per month.
View Activity Reports.
The Coffee Meets Bagel cost varies based on how long you subscribe for:
1 Month: $34.99
3 Months: $74.99 ($25 per month)
6 Months: $119.99 ($20 per month)
At the time of writing, there's an Easter sale—you can get 6 Months of Premium for the same price as 3 Months of Premium, $74.99. Keep an eye out for seasonal discounts to get a better price on a Premium subscription.
Coffee Meets Bagel Platinum
In older reviews, CMB Mini is mentioned, which is basically a Premium membership but with fewer features; however, we weren't offered this. We were instead offered CMB Platinum. It seems like these are both being tested in different locations.
The extra features for Platinum include:
Priority Likes (moves you to the front of the other person's suggested list).
Infinite Boost – Boost will always be active.
You can control who views you—if you want, you can only be viewed by people you've liked or people who've already liked you for an incognito experience.
The Coffee Meets Bagel price for a Platinum subscription is $149.99 for 3 months, which is $49.99 per month. All subscriptions will be charged as the full amount in one payment upfront.
Coffee Meets Bagel Beans
Beans (coffee beans) are the currency CMB uses for things like Boost and sending flowers. You can earn beans for free by liking Coffee Meets Bagel's social media pages:
Earn 100 beans for following on X (formerly Twitter) or tweeting about them.
Earn 200 beans by following them on Instagram.
While this seems helpful, those 100-400 beans barely cover the cost of liking someone else. You can spend your beans on the following:
Boost: 750 beans
Extend chat: 99 beans
See more Bagels in your Suggested tab: 250 beans
Like profiles in the Discover tab: 385 beans
Their current Beans packages are:
3000 beans: $24.99 ("Discounted" from $60)
2000 beans: $23.99 ("Discounted" from $40)
100 beans: $1.99
This "discount" has persisted for at least 3 months as of the time of writing, and users have noted that it has consistently been in place. This indicates the possibility that it might be a marketing strategy known as a Fake Discount. Fake Discounts involve showing a high price and offering a discounted price, but the higher price is fake and only exists to convince you that the 'new lower' price is a great deal.
How Safe Is CoffeeMeetsBagel?
Report and Hide Profiles
If someone is misbehaving on the app by being abusive, or you suspect they may be using fake photos or trying to scam you, you can anonymously report their profile. You'll find the report button at the bottom of their profile or by clicking the three dots in the chat. Reporting a profile immediately sends them to the Coffee Meet Bagel moderation team, who will investigate and take appropriate action (including suspending or terminating the profile).
Reports are best reserved for serious situations. For less serious issues like someone ghosting you or just being a bit creepy, you can hide them. Hiding a profile removes them from your chat history and likes list, and they won't be offered as a daily pick again. Reporting will have a similar effect, and both reporting and hiding someone is discreetly handled – they won't know you've taken either step.
Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
The Terms of Use and Privacy Policy are well-written, easy to read, and contain no concerning clauses. There is mention of potential identity verification, which will be done by the Coffee Meets Bagel customer service team requesting a selfie where you copy a certain pose or upload your identity document. Likely, this is only done if you get reported or flagged for using fake pictures.
It would be comforting, however, if CMB followed in the footsteps of many other dating apps and allowed you to proactively verify yourself to get a badge on your profile. This would prove to other users that you are who you say you are and possibly reduce reports of fake or fraudulent profiles.
Final Thoughts
The Coffee Meets Bagel app was created to make online dating easier by reducing the options. It's a great idea, and the app's premise is very appealing. After gaining attention by appearing on Shark Tank, the app experienced a period of growth, but this has seemingly declined. An application like CMB needs a large use base to work perfectly, and unfortunately, there just aren't enough users.
Because there aren't as many users as would be ideal, you likely won't get the best app experience. Our test profiles found a serious lack of users outside of bigger cities, and the app has many bugs. The premium subscription is expensive considering the perks that come with it, and experienced users of the app indicate that the free user experience is becoming progressively worse. Beans are affordable but seem like an unnecessary extra expense.
For these reasons, we rate Coffee Meets Bagel 7/10. There is great potential, but the app needs work and seems to be becoming a money grab. If you're in a big city, it's worth trying it out while it's still free, but if you live more rurally, you'd be better served by more mainstream apps.
FAQ
How does Coffee Meets Bagel work?
First, you sign up and complete your profile. Each day at noon, you'll get a list of suggested users to pick from. If you and the other person like each other, you'll match, and you can start chatting. You will then have 7 days to meet or connect on another social media platform before the chat expires.
Is Coffee Meets Bagel good?
Yes, it's a great app for busy people who want to save time on endless swiping. It's easy to use and can be used for free, but it is still growing, so its user base is limited.
Is Coffee Meets Bagel free to use?
It is! It's free to create an account, view your daily picks, match, and chat with them. There are some paid features, but these are only to enhance the overall user experience.
Who owns Coffee Meets Bagel?
Coffee Meets Bagel Incorporated owns the app.
How much is Coffee Meets Bagel worth?
As of 2024, Coffee Meets Bagel's net worth is estimated to be over $150 million, and revenue is estimated to be $36 million each year.
