Introducing Dear Bestie: The First ID-Verified Friendship App Built for Women

Dear Bestie is the first ID-verified friendship app built for women. In a category dominated by mixed-gender platforms and bot-filled community apps, Dear Bestie is setting a new standard, verifying every single member with both a government-issued ID and a real-time selfie before they're allowed in. The result is a women's community where every profile is real, every interaction starts with trust and the friendships that form have a chance to actually last.

Available now on the iOS App Store. Home-based in Miami. Expanding fast nationwide, with hundreds of signups in the first week alone.

A platform women have been asking for

Women's friendships are powerful. They're the relationships that hold lives together. They're the source of the joy, support and steadiness that everything else gets built on.

For years, women have been asking for a platform that takes those friendships seriously. A real, safe place to find new friends, real BFFs and women they actually click with in their cities. Not strangers from a feed. The kind of community that's hard to come by anywhere else online.

The apps that claimed to fill the gap were broken in obvious ways. Mixed-gender platforms built around dating-adjacent dynamics. Generic community apps full of bots and fake accounts. Anywhere women tried to make a friend online, they were met with scammers, catfishing accounts and unwanted male contact at every turn.

Dear Bestie is the answer. Built for women. By women. With trust, safety and real connection at the foundation.

Verification is the floor

Every Dear Bestie member completes identity verification at signup. Both a government-issued ID and a real-time selfie that has to match it. Verification runs through Didit, a privacy-respecting verification partner. Dear Bestie does not retain copies of IDs or selfies after the verification step is complete.

In practice, every woman on Dear Bestie has been verified through the same process as the woman discovering her. The friend messaged tomorrow is the person whose profile was viewed today. Real. Verified. Present.

Not a swipe app

Dear Bestie is the opposite of a swipe-and-match platform. There's no rapid-fire judgment based on a single photo. Profiles on Dear Bestie are rich, detailed and built to surface women whose energy actually matches yours. Bios. Vibes. Interests. What you're looking for. What your week looks like. What kind of friendships you're trying to build. The platform is designed for real connection, not for collecting matches.

That's the foundation. Above it, Dear Bestie is built around the moments and spaces where women's friendships actually form.

Circles, Events, Plans and more

Circles

Women can build their own group around anything they care about. Book club. Wellness. Entrepreneurship. New moms. Solo travelers. Music nerds. Whatever the passion, gather your people around it. Or discover Circles other women have built and join the ones that fit. It's how community happens on Dear Bestie. Interest-based, women-led, organized on each user's terms.

Events

Plan and host events for the women in your community or discover events other women are throwing in your city. Brunches. Fitness classes. Gallery nights. Networking mixers. Anything worth showing up for. Dear Bestie's event tools connect verified women at real events in real places, turning the digital community into something that lives offline too.

Plans

Make a last-minute plan and open it up to other women nearby. A hot girl walk. Hitting the beach this afternoon. Grabbing coffee. A workout class. Dear Bestie made room for the spontaneous, day-of moments where some of the best friendships start.

Women-owned business discovery

This is one of Dear Bestie's most quietly powerful features. Women who run a business, salon, studio, restaurant or any kind of women-loved space can be discovered by all the local women in their community. And on the flip side, women looking for the right hairstylist, nail tech, esthetician, trainer or any kind of women-owned space in their city can find it inside the app. Local women supporting local women, built directly into the platform.

Travel mode

Visiting a new city? Enter your travel date in advance and start showing up in that city's Discover before you even land. Connect with verified women in your destination, plan meetups before the trip and arrive with a community already forming. Built for women who move, travel and don't want to wait until they're settled to build real community wherever they go.

All of it inside the same trusted, verified women's community.

Built for all women

Dear Bestie welcomes all women, including transgender and non-binary women. The identity verification process exists to confirm membership in the community. If automated verification doesn't reflect a user's identity, Dear Bestie offers a manual review process. Reach out to hello@dearbestie.app and the team will review additional documentation to confirm the account.

Safety as a permanent commitment

Verification was step one. Above it, Dear Bestie is building community moderation, reporting tools, safety guidance for in-person meetups and the operational care that keeps a community healthy as it scales. Women said safety mattered most. Dear Bestie is treating that as a permanent commitment, not a launch feature. Every product decision passes through a safety filter before anything else.

Bigger than a friendship app

Dear Bestie launched and is home-based in Miami, but is quickly spreading nationwide by the hundreds to cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas. Women all over are excited for something this groundbreaking.

What Dear Bestie is really building is bigger than an app. It's the platform women's friendships deserve. The default place women go to find their people, plan their weeks, host their events and build the kind of communities they wish had existed for them all along, with safety at the frontier.

Built by a woman, for women

Developed by a solo female founder herself, Dear Bestie was created by a woman who has experienced moving to a brand new city and starting from scratch. Someone who knows how real friendships actually form and how often the platforms women turn to fall short. Someone who has navigated the safety challenges women face online and in person and decided to build the platform she wished had existed. Dear Bestie was built by a woman who believed women deserved better, with a passion for delivering exactly that.

Dear Bestie was built by a woman who believed women deserved better, with a passion for delivering exactly that.

How to join

Dear Bestie is free to download on the iOS App Store. Verification takes minutes. Once verified, instantly browse local women near you, jump into Circles, host or discover events, make a last-minute plan, find women-owned businesses in your city and start meeting the women who match your energy.

Dear Bestie isn't just another friendship app. It has set a new standard for women focused social networking and is set to become a major name in the women's tech sector. And it isn't stopping anytime soon.

The future of female friendships starts here.