You Just Moved to LA. Here's the First 90 Days.
The boxes are unpacked and your phone is quiet. A week-by-week plan for building a life here before the loneliness sets in.
Two years ago the phrase “app to make friends” got a wince. Now there’s a category. The U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness a public health crisis in 2023, a generation that met its partners on apps stopped seeing why friends should be different, and by last year more than a dozen local friendship apps had done roughly $16 million in U.S. consumer spending, per Appfigures. Los Angeles, the loneliest well-populated place in America, is where most of them want to be.
We make one of them, so read this with that in mind. But we also use the others, and the honest answer to “which app should I use to meet people in LA” is that it depends entirely on how you want to meet them. There are really only four formats. Here’s each one, who does it well, and what it costs.
Format 1: Dinner With Strangers
Timeleft, and 222
The idea that made this category: you’re matched with a handful of strangers and sent to a restaurant on a set night. Timeleft does it every Wednesday at 7pm, five to a table, matched on age and a personality questionnaire; you learn a little about your tablemates the night before and pay for your own dinner on top of a ticket. 222 is the LA-born version with a harder edge: a vetting process, a $22.22 curation fee per event (or a monthly subscription at the same price), and venues that range beyond dinner into wine bars and comedy clubs. Both are iOS first.
Good for: people who want the decision made for them and don’t mind a stranger-dinner having the slight air of a blind date with four people. Watch for: the cost adds up fast if you go weekly, and the format is one-shot: the five of you may never see each other again, and friendship runs on repetition.
Format 2: Swipe for Friends
Bumble BFF
Bumble’s friendship mode has been around since 2016 and became its own app in 2023; a 2025 redesign pushed it toward group meetups and communities, which is an admission that swiping one-to-one for friends never quite worked. It’s free, it’s the biggest by user base, and it works the way you’d guess: profiles, swipes, matches, a chat that you then have to turn into a plan yourselves.
Good for: people who like choosing exactly who they talk to. Watch for: the chat-that-never-becomes-a-plan problem. Everything dating apps get wrong about logistics, friend-swiping gets wrong too, because the app’s job ends at the match and the hard part starts after it.
Format 3: Big Groups, Shared Interests
Meetup, and Pie
Meetup is the elder: around since 2002, millions of users, every hobby you can name and a few you can’t. In LA that means hiking groups with 20,000 members, language exchanges, board game nights, and a lot of groups that haven’t posted since 2019. Pie is the newer, slicker version of the same instinct: RSVP to an event, take a quick personality quiz, and the algorithm sorts attendees into groups of six and drops them into a chat before the night. It’s in Austin, Chicago and San Francisco; Los Angeles isn’t on the list yet.
Good for: people with a specific interest who want a crowd that shares it. Watch for: Meetup’s groups vary enormously in quality and size, and a 40-person hike is a crowd, not a conversation. You can go to ten Meetups and know nobody.
Format 4: Small Groups Around a Plan
Washed Up, and Buffet
The newest format and the one Los Angeles seems to be inventing. Washed Up launched in early 2026 for LA specifically: people create or join small “plans” tied to real events, concerts, trivia, comedy, and chat with the group before they go.
Buffet is ours, so we’ll describe it the way we’d want to be described. Every week there’s a short list of things happening around LA, around six, chosen by hand, Thursday to Sunday. You claim a plate at one. When the third person claims a seat the table is real and the group chat opens; a table never grows past six. You can also invite one person directly for something one-to-one. It’s free, iOS only, Los Angeles only, and the list is public if you want to see what’s on before you download anything.
Good for: people who’ve worked out that the obstacle was never meeting people, it was organising them. Watch for: both are new and LA-only, so the question is whether there’s a plan near you on the night you’re free. (For Buffet, the honest answer is that the list is two picks a night across the city, so some weeks your neighbourhood is on it and some weeks you drive.)
A Quick Comparison
| Format | Group size | Price | Where | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timeleft | Dinner with strangers | 5 | Ticket + your dinner | Many cities |
| 222 | Curated events | Small groups | $22.22 per event or per month | Los Angeles and others |
| Bumble BFF | Swipe for friends | 1:1, some groups | Free (paid tiers) | Everywhere |
| Meetup | Interest groups | Any, often large | Free to join; some events paid | Everywhere |
| Pie | Events, sorted into sixes | 6 | Not stated | Austin, Chicago, SF |
| Washed Up | Small plans at events | Small groups | Not stated | Los Angeles |
| Buffet | Weekly list, claim a plate | 1:1 or six or less | Free | Los Angeles |
Prices and cities are as published in October 2026 and change often; check the app before you commit.
What Actually Predicts Whether an App Works
Having used all of these, three things seem to matter far more than the matching algorithm.
Does the app make the plan, or just the introduction? Every format that ends at a chat window inherits the dating-app problem: a thread that goes quiet. The ones that work hand you a place and a time and make you say yes or no to it.
Is the group small enough to talk? Five or six is the number. At a table of five everyone speaks to everyone; at a hike of forty you speak to the person next to you and lose them at the car park.
Does it repeat? This is the one almost none of the apps solve, and the one the research says matters most. A friend takes something like fifty hours; a great dinner is two of them. Whichever app you pick, the thing that will decide whether you make friends is whether you use it every week, with a bias toward the same places and the same faces. An app that puts something on your calendar weekly, without you having to arrange it, is doing the part that counts.
Our Honest Recommendation
If you want one memorable night, try a stranger dinner. If you have a hobby, Meetup still has the deepest bench. If you’d rather choose people than plans, Bumble BFF. And if you’ve noticed that your problem was never a shortage of people in Los Angeles but a shortage of plans that actually happen, that’s the format we built, and the list for this weekend is up.
Whichever you choose, go alone, go again next week, and stay a bit longer than you meant to. The app is the easy part.
Download Buffet · Free · Los Angeles
