Buyer's guide
How much do AI companion apps cost? A 2026 pricing breakdown
16 July 2026 · 8 min read · By the Aroused team
Most AI companion apps cost between $10 and $35 per month in 2026, with the majority of paid plans clustered around $13 to $20. Annual billing usually drops the effective price 30 to 60 percent, and several apps offer a free tier with hard limits on memory, messages or voice. The monthly number is the easy part. What actually varies, and what you are really paying for, is memory, message limits and whether extras like voice and images are bundled or metered.
What the major apps charge in 2026
Prices below are from each platform's own published pages and app-store listings as of July 2026. Companion apps change pricing often, so confirm before you subscribe.
| App | Free tier? | Paid price (US, 2026) | What paid unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replika | Yes | ~$19.99/mo or $69.99/yr (lifetime option listed) | Voice calls, 3D avatar, roleplay |
| Nomi.ai | Yes, limited | $15.99/mo or $99.99/yr | Deeper memory, up to 10 companions, group chats |
| Candy.ai | No | $13.99/mo, cheaper on 3 and 12 month terms | Chat plus 100 image tokens/mo, 18+ images and video |
| Character.AI | Yes | $9.99/mo or $94.99/yr | Faster replies, priority access, perks |
| Janitor AI | Yes | $12.99/mo (janitor+) | Extras; you can also connect your own model |
| Aroused | No (pre-launch) | Planned $9.99 to $34.99/mo | Persistent memory, full design, no free tier |
Why the same price buys very different things
Two apps at $15 a month can be nothing alike. The single biggest hidden variable is memory: some plans keep a rich, persistent record of your relationship, while others cap context to a few thousand tokens and quietly forget last week. Memory is expensive to run, so an app that markets deep continuity and charges almost nothing is a flag worth noticing. The second variable is metering. A plan can look cheap until images, voice minutes or "advanced" messages are sold as separate tokens on top, and your real monthly cost floats with use.
Read the paid tier for three things before the price: whether memory is persistent or session-only, whether messages are unlimited or capped, and whether voice and images are included or billed per use. Those three answers explain almost every price difference in the table above. Our pricing page spells out the same trade-offs for Aroused, on purpose, so there is nothing to discover after you subscribe.
What "free" actually costs
A free companion tier is a fine way to test an app, but free-forever as the whole business model deserves suspicion. Running memory and inference is not cheap, so a company giving it away is usually funded another way, and in this category that often means your conversations and profile become the product. The most sensitive data you can hand an app is a record of your private, intimate chats, and once it is collected it can be analyzed, retained, or in the worst cases exposed. If you have used a lot of free apps over the years, it is worth periodically scrubbing your personal details from the data-broker sites that buy and sell this kind of information, so an old signup does not follow you around.
This is why serious companion products tend to be subscription-funded and say so plainly. When you are the paying customer, the incentive is to keep you happy, not to monetize your diary. Vague pricing paired with intense emotional design is the worst combination in the space, and we treat it as a red flag in our guide to whether companion apps are safe.
How to tell a fair price from a trap
A fair companion subscription in 2026 looks like this: a clear monthly number, an annual option that saves you money, memory and message limits stated up front, and any add-ons (voice, images) either included or priced transparently. A trap looks like the opposite: a headline price that hides token metering, "unlimited" claims with asterisks, or a free tier so generous it can only be paying for itself with your data. Price is rarely the reason to pick one companion over another, because they cluster so tightly; the honest differences are memory, content policy and whether the company treats you as the customer or the inventory.
So what should you budget?
Plan for roughly $12 to $20 a month for a good paid companion app, or about $70 to $120 a year if you commit annually and the app offers it. Spend a free tier or a no-account demo first to confirm the personality and memory feel right, then pay for the plan whose limits you actually understand. If you want to see how the paid apps stack up beyond price, the comparison of the best AI companions covers memory, content rules and privacy together, and the Replika alternative guide is the place to start if a recent price or policy change is what sent you looking.