Utterly abysmal excuse of a pay-to-play dating app.
CMB is by far the worst dating app I’ve used out of the “top” ones. Your actions have a choke hold based on the in-app currency - Beans. To receive 200 beans, you can follow them on Instagram. To receive 500 beans, you have to act as THEIR marketer by spamming out referral links to your friends, hoping that they’ll bite. Other than that (unless you pay...), you receive 5 beans PER DAY for swiping through your daily bagels. In order to LIKE somebody on CMB through the discover tab, you need to cough up 385 beans. Three hundred eighty five. 385!!!!!! YOU GET 5 BEANS DAILY FOR FREE. I’m currently down to 50 beans. That means UNLESS I PAY, I have to wait 67 DAYS in order to accrue enough beans to like somebody in the discover tab!!! SIXTY SEVEN DAYS.
When I first signed up, I was getting 10 bagels per day. I got an in-app offer for the premium subscription model with a free week. My daily bagels has now fallen to TWO. I am getting less bagels as a PAID user.
While the discovery tab is nice in terms of filtering your preferences, the bean concept is absurd if you’re charging 385 to LIKE somebody. And two daily bagels is a joke. Horrible horrible overall app experience. NEXT!
When I first signed up, I was getting 10 bagels per day. I got an in-app offer for the premium subscription model with a free week. My daily bagels has now fallen to TWO. I am getting less bagels as a PAID user.
While the discovery tab is nice in terms of filtering your preferences, the bean concept is absurd if you’re charging 385 to LIKE somebody. And two daily bagels is a joke. Horrible horrible overall app experience. NEXT!
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Too many notifications
I don’t think people read them, I know I don’t. I don’t want to receive bot notifications... only interested in those showing the message someone sent me. Also, it’s actually kind of pressurising to see all of these messages reminding that the chat will close and that I should message etc, in the conversation. Unnecessary and a bit annoying. Maybe it can be removed and we can focus on our matches instead.
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Best of the Rest
Had this, Bumble and Tinder off and on for years. CMB is definitely the one with the people more serious about finding a relationship. I had these, like most people as a sort of side plan. Don’t put too much effort or reliance on these apps but don’t brush them off either! Eventually you are bound to finally match with someone who fits you perfectly. That’s what happened to me (after about 4 years... haha).
Anyways, I like the setup because it prevents you from droning through a hundred profiles a day and instead tries to find a handful of people that match your preferences. Whenever I would hit a week where no bagels were found I’d just delete it for a couple months to let the pool of potential matches grow. Try and make your profile a little interesting with a funny picture or favorite movie line or something because maybe your match will recognize it and it’ll kick things off. Get rid of the party photos and ones with no smiles, no one actually likes those.
It’s good to give your profile a make over now and then. I changed my profile around so much over the years. I recommend this app over others but remember you don’t necessarily want a fast connection. Take your time, decide what characteristics or values you like in a match and stick to them. Good luck!
Anyways, I like the setup because it prevents you from droning through a hundred profiles a day and instead tries to find a handful of people that match your preferences. Whenever I would hit a week where no bagels were found I’d just delete it for a couple months to let the pool of potential matches grow. Try and make your profile a little interesting with a funny picture or favorite movie line or something because maybe your match will recognize it and it’ll kick things off. Get rid of the party photos and ones with no smiles, no one actually likes those.
It’s good to give your profile a make over now and then. I changed my profile around so much over the years. I recommend this app over others but remember you don’t necessarily want a fast connection. Take your time, decide what characteristics or values you like in a match and stick to them. Good luck!
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Response from developer
Thanks so much for the review and kind words!
My favorite dating app; used to be cleaner
I used this app in early 2019 before they updated it to the scroll style, which is now more like Hinge in that all the photos are laid out vertically and you scroll down, with bio information interspersed. I find this to be a cluttered, ugly style and it’s why I hated Hinge. What I liked about CMB is that it had a clean layout, encourages you to fill out some basic but meaningful information about yourself, and prioritizes quality over quantity in a way other dating apps don’t. CMB is, I think, the best app for finding a relationship as opposed to a hookup, or at least for meeting nice people with whom you can have a conversation. Curating your selection of daily bagels encourages you to consider each potential match more carefully, while the explore section gives you more variety, and since it’s not a swipe style like other apps, you can spend more time engaging with each person’s profile and making a decision. In short, CMB is the only dating app I’ve ever really liked, and I had several good dates from it. I met my boyfriend (I’m female and was using the app to meet men) really quickly through CMB, so I only used the app for a few weeks. I kept it on my phone to keep our first conversation, and recently opened it to be disappointed with the way the profiles look now. But I haven’t tried it with this new style, and I’d still recommend the app on the strength of how good it was when I used it.
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Response from developer
Thanks so much for the review and kind words!
Persistent Glitches are Ruining this App
In concept, I like Coffee Meets Bagel a lot. However, every time I come back to it, I run in to problems that make it virtually unusable. On this most recent foray, I got several matches, sent a hello and waited for the reply. And it came! A welcome notification on my phone that a match had messaged me back. So, I opened the app...the message wasn’t there. No updates to my chats since the last message I sent. Shutting the app down and restarting had no effect, so I tried reinstalling. The reinstall resulted in all of my chats but one disappearing. Not finding any more useful trouble shooting guidance online, I tried one more reinstall. Now all of my chats are gone.
Based on previous experience, the conversations will eventually load in the app...three hours from now, or five or eight. There’s no way to really know. But these kinds of updating problems are pretty fundamental and the fact that they have not been fixed after months of problems for me and other users is frustrating.
Perhaps there is an update in the works that will resolve these issues. One can hope, but in the meantime I think I’ll be putting this app aside.
Based on previous experience, the conversations will eventually load in the app...three hours from now, or five or eight. There’s no way to really know. But these kinds of updating problems are pretty fundamental and the fact that they have not been fixed after months of problems for me and other users is frustrating.
Perhaps there is an update in the works that will resolve these issues. One can hope, but in the meantime I think I’ll be putting this app aside.
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Thank you CMB
People are more inclined to open up and be vulnerable and just themselves on CMB, which is sorely needed in the dating scene. I had some pretty deep chats on most of the dates I went on from the very start, and also found my current boyfriend on CMB within a few weeks. I don’t know whether there are a lot of members or just more accurate algorithms but it got to know my type much faster than Hinge or Once. The app churned out attractive men one by one... I was wondering where they were all hiding 😂
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Good concept poor execution
On the plus side the idea behind the app of encouraging people to be more discerning rather than just ego swiping or cat-fishing people is great.
On the down side it’s very expensive to buy a membership which also requires you on top of membership to buy their own currency (‘beans’) to interact with matches. It is also extremely buggy so for example my profile was blocked for no reason just after joining which took several unanswered requests for assistance before someone finally responded and sorted the problem. Then two weeks after setting up my profile as a man seeking a woman half my matches started being men. This time no response at all from customer service.
CMB has reportedly received $8.4million in seed capital but most of that seems to have been spent on sending the customer service team in an extended round the world cruise.
As dehumanising as Tinder and even Bumble are at least the tech works which is more than can be said for CMB.
Deleted membership.
On the down side it’s very expensive to buy a membership which also requires you on top of membership to buy their own currency (‘beans’) to interact with matches. It is also extremely buggy so for example my profile was blocked for no reason just after joining which took several unanswered requests for assistance before someone finally responded and sorted the problem. Then two weeks after setting up my profile as a man seeking a woman half my matches started being men. This time no response at all from customer service.
CMB has reportedly received $8.4million in seed capital but most of that seems to have been spent on sending the customer service team in an extended round the world cruise.
As dehumanising as Tinder and even Bumble are at least the tech works which is more than can be said for CMB.
Deleted membership.
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CmB has changed, in a not so good way.
I recall when CmB was an awesome dating app to use. The overall concept and just simply the name was/is great. Fast forward to today and something tells me that a lot of these profiles of people/women are inactive profiles. This includes the profiles under the Discover tab. I know there's the Active within the last 72 hours function, but the effort of description in these profiles tell me that they're either fake profiles or inactive. The profile may be an actual user but they have been inactive on CmB for months. Maybe not even have the app on their phone any longer. Most likely they did not suspend or delete their account when coming off. I think CmB should have a system that filters out profiles where the user has not been active the least 2-3 weeks, and putting priority to the daily active profiles. Us active users shouldn't continue to pay for extra coffee beans or a premium subscription if a lot of the profiles have had zero activity for some weeks.
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Chat list
I wish the chat list had more options on how to categorize or label your chats so that you can keep track of all the matches. If either we can put them on different folders or have a way of highlighting or hiding certain chats without leaving the chats so the other person doesn’t feel rejected or confused or hurt by that notice, I think would be really helpful. Also, the “would you like to extend the chat” notice doesn’t help in keeping track of what type of conversations you’ve had w that person before the chat expired. It would be nice to have either their phone number easily visible on the chat list if they’ve provided it, or have a blank for chats that never had a conversation in it. These are all ways to keep track of a large volume of chats simultaneously. It’s hard to remember every match and all the conversations you’be had with each one of them, so having a way of organizing or labeling chats would be extremely helpful and efficient for this dating app.
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Control and quality guaranteed
I honestly didn’t think I would find someone serious on this site and took over three months thinking about opening an account. Then when I did; it kicked me out for verification but the support person John was very professional and prompt in responding to the email exchanges. And in a couple of days my profile was verified and back on. Now I appreciate that extra step because it ensures control and quality of members which is hard in this era of internet scams and frauds. The downside; there isn’t too much information on the beans system hahaha...I would recommend this app, just as my friend recommended it. Thanks for getting me my happiness CMB👍👌
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