One dating app is trying to end ‘ghosting’ by charging $35 per month
Coffee Meets Bagel is launching a premium membership—for more than most gyms charge each month—that the company bets will help prevent matches from ignoring each other.
It’s happened to pretty much anyone who’s ever used a dating app: You make a great match, send off the perfect opening line—you did read our 5 rules for crafting a sure-fire first message, right?—and wait for a response. You wait a few hours, and then a few days. A week goes by before you realize what’s happened—you’ve been “ghosted.”
So what went wrong?
Maybe she never caught your message. Maybe she hardly uses that dating app anymore. Or maybe she just straight-up doesn’t want to talk to you. The worst part is, you’ll never know for sure.
One dating app, however, is trying to change all that with an interesting new tactic.
Coffee Meets Bagel—a dating app you’ve likely heard of before, because it’s been around since 2012—just launched a premium membership with a slew of new features that will help prevent users from experiencing the romantic agony of never hearing back from a match.
The catch? It’ll set you back $35 a month.
According to a new post on the Coffee Meet Bagel blog, the normally free dating app is launching a new CMB Premium membership, which allows users to see stats like about potential matches (or “bagels,” as the app refers to them)—like whether a match has opened the app within the past 72 hours, their average response time to messages, and their usual response time. Plus, you’d have to reason that anyone paying $35 a month for anything is more likely to use it than someone who can use it for free.
Still: $35 ain’t nothing. (For the sake of comparison, it’s over three times the cost of Tinder Plus and Bumble Boost.) But we’ll bet that anyone shelling out a gym membership’s worth of money each month is going to be pretty damn invested in scoring a first date.
