Review

CoffeeMeetsBagel Review

 

CoffeeMeetsBagel is not a good dating site. There – you’ve got the gist of my whole review in one sentence. If you’re looking for a quality dating site to meet people in your area, you can do a lot better than this one. I’ll go into specifics throughout this review, but if you’d like to save your time and just move to one of the sites I’ve reviewed and found to be a great tool for dating, I won’t blame you. Suffice to say, CoffeeMeetsBagel will not help you meet people as well as plenty of other, less expensive sites out there.

 

First Impressions

 

The first thing the this site asks you to do when you start your profile is plug in your facebook account. It basically takes all your friends, and then their friends, and so on, and then finds the ones that are also using CoffeeMeetsBagel. Then it starts matching you up with those people. However, unlike most sites which try to give you as many options as possible, so that you can cast your dating net far and wide, as it were, this site prides itself on only giving you one match a day. That’s their selling point. They seem to think that having lots of people to choose from is bad, and just one a day is good enough. Personally, I have found that meeting the right person for a serious relationship, or even second date means trying first dates with lots of people.

 

So, I, the “coffee” in this situation, went to bed wondering who the “bagel” (girl) would be that they match me up with. I also wondered why I needed this site, when I could just surf through my friends’ friends myself on facebook. But, I told myself, that’s what this review site is all about – trying new things.

 

So, the next day I found my inbox crammed with the one match they found for me. I looked through this woman’s profile, and I thought I recognised her. She was the ex-girlfriend of my best buddy Kirk. So, the site had scoured the friends of my friends and found the one girl that it would be incredibly awkward to date. And, now I had to wait until the next day to see another girl they matched me with!
As if that wasn’t bad enough, my buddy’s ex was now contacting me, because it turns out she had always had a thing for me. I knew Kirk wasn’t over her yet, so now I had to deal with an over zealous girl who couldn’t understand that going out with her would hurt my buddy. Wonderful.

 

Pros

 

The next day there was a new girl that I didn’t recognise, and she was very cute and interesting. To see who our mutual friends were, I had to buy “coffee beans” to unlock that information. I’ll get to the price in a minute. She and I started chatting and set up a first date. The one and only good thing about this site is that they offer discounts on date ideas and group meet-up events around town. So, that meant that the dance we attended was about half price from what it normally would be. Unfortunately, the chemistry wasn’t really there, so no second date was talked about, and there wasn’t even a good bye kiss proffered.  She did manage to get me out on the dance floor, which I hadn’t done in years, and luckily there are plenty of iphone pics attesting to why I had stayed away. Wonderful.

 

Price

 

To see your match’s profile is free, but to find out more info, like who your common friends are, it costs about a buck. Also, to see more than one profile a day, or to see a profile you previously passed on, it costs you about three bucks. You can buy their currency, the coffee beans, in denominations of one hundred, two thousand, or three thousand (which translates to one – thirty dollars).  However, at the moment, since the site is trying to get a larger membership due to its newness, you can get beans for recommending people that join the site.  I’m not sure it’s worth jeopardising your friendship by hooking them up with this terrible site, but if you’ve got some friends you want to get rid of, this might be the perfect method to do it.

 

 

Cons

 

Well, as you have probably surmised throughout my review, I was not impressed with this site whatsoever. The premise the entire enterprise is based on – that people are tired of lots of choices in their matches on dating sites – is to me, erroneous from the get go. I think you want as many choices as possible. Plus, since this site gets all your matches from your facebook friends, you might as well save yourself the time and money and just ask your friends to recommend dates for you. The only good thing about the site is the deals you get on dates and mixers, but I found that about 90% of the deals they have were pretty lame and uninteresting. This is a personal thing, however, so maybe you’re into the things they have set up for dates.

 

Bottom Line

I’ve been saying it since the first sentence. This is not, in my humble opinion, a good dating site. The good farmer knows that only by spreading his seeds far and wide will some grow into a fruitful crop. Similarly, a dater looking for a significant other, or even just a second date, needs to have many options. I mean, that’s what online dating is so good for – right? If you wanted to one at a time things, you could just go to a bar and try to get a single number each night. Internet dating is about playing the odds and increasing the numbers. I’d give this one a pass. There are plenty of other sites that are less money and do more for you.