BFF is no longer a mode you switch into. Bumble retired it from the main app on 30 October 2025 and moved friendship to a separate download, Bumble For Friends, which absorbed the group chats and local events Bumble picked up when it bought Geneva in July 2024. If you liked the format, it now has a whole app to itself.
Notapub has no deck and no profile. You write what you want or what you are into, and the people it fits reach you. What you wrote is the only thing being matched.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
Friendship inside Bumble was roughly fifteen percent of the app's monthly users before the split, which is a large number to move. The standalone app opened to about ninety-seven thousand downloads in its first weeks. People holding a lifetime premium subscription had to contact support to carry it across, which tells you how much of the plumbing was rebuilt.
Worth knowing before you download it, because a page comparing Notapub to a mode that no longer exists would be comparing you to nothing. The format survived the move intact: a profile, photos, and a stack of people to judge.
The card deck was built for a different job, where the picture is most of the information and one match is the whole goal. Applied to friendship it asks you to make several hundred yes-or-no judgments about strangers' faces to arrive at a handful of chats, and it hands the sorting work to you. Then the chat begins with nothing in it, so both of you have to invent a reason to keep going. The steady complaints about the format, silence after matching and the strain of arranging a one-on-one meeting with someone you have no shared task with, are what an empty opener produces.
Notapub inverts the input. You write one sentence about something real, and it starts already inside the conversation. Somebody wanted a tennis partner on weekday mornings, or a person who has moved a family to Berlin, and now there is a reason to write back. On Notapub the person who writes well about what they want is on level ground with the most photogenic one, because photos are optional here and nothing is ranked by them.
The premium tier is sold by the week, commonly somewhere between fourteen and eighteen dollars, and what it mostly buys is the ability to see who already liked you and to accept more people. That is a paywall placed exactly where the format creates anxiety, and it works because the deck creates the anxiety in the first place.
Notapub is free, on iPhone, Android and the web, for ages thirteen and up. There is no list of people withheld from you behind a payment, because there is no deck to hold anything back from.
The gap is one order of magnitude in effort and roughly that again in what arrives. Several hundred swipes to a chat with nothing in it, against one sentence to a person who answered it on purpose.
It is also durable. What you wrote keeps working after you close the app, so somebody who reads it in three weeks can still reach you. A card you swiped past three weeks ago is gone.
For finding people without a profile or a deck to sort, yes. You say what you want and the right people come to you.
No. Nothing here is ranked by a picture. What you write does the work.
No. There is no deck, no profile to fill in and nothing framed around romance. It is for finding the right person for anything, and who that turns out to be is your business.