How much do AI companion apps cost? A 2026 pricing breakdown

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, rechecked on 3 September 2026. Companion apps change pricing often, so confirm before you subscribe. One change has landed since: SpicyChat raised every tier on 8 September 2026, and the table shows both the old and the current figures. The same subscription usually covers an AI boyfriend or an AI girlfriend, since almost every platform lets you choose the character's presence, so there is no separate price list for either.

App	Free tier?	Paid price (US, 2026)	What paid unlocks
Replika	Yes	App Store lists $7.99 and $14.99 monthly, $49.99 and $69.99 annual (Oct 2026)	Voice calls, 3D avatar, roleplay
Nomi.ai	Yes, limited	$15.99/mo, $39.99/quarter or $99.99/yr, plus credit packs	Deeper memory, several companions, group chats
SpicyChat	Yes	$5.00, $14.95 and $24.95/mo, raised to $5.95, $19.95 and $29.95 on 8 Sept 2026	No ads, 4K to 16K context memory, more personas, images, text to speech
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
GirlfriendGPT	Yes	$5, $10 and $35/mo	Not published; the site never says what a tier includes
Infatuated AI	Yes	$9.99/mo, $23.97/3mo or $83.88/yr	100 to 175 tokens a month, and one sent message costs one token
Aroused	Yes, a one-time demo of 25 messages	$6.50 to $25.00/mo billed yearly	Persistent memory, full design, one-time 25-message free demo

Three of those rows now have a page of their own here, because the paperwork behind the price turned out to matter as much as the number. We read Nomi's refund and cancellation terms and pulled its full in-app purchase list on our Nomi AI pricing and alternative page, and we broke down the September increase tier by tier on our SpicyChat pricing page, including which subscribers keep their old rate and what ends the lock. Every SpicyChat tier is priced on both billing terms, with what each one includes, in how much SpicyChat costs.

The last two rows are the two ends of the honesty scale and both were read first-hand on 3 September 2026. GirlfriendGPT has the cheapest paid tier in this table at $5 a month, but it publishes those three prices inside its own FAQ and never says what separates them, so you are buying a number with no feature list attached. Infatuated AI does the opposite and publishes a full table of what every action costs in tokens, which is how we can say that its $9.99 plan is really a hundred messages a month rather than a month of chatting. Both, and the reason the girlfriendgpt.ai domain lands you on the second one, are covered on our GirlfriendGPT pricing and alternative page.

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.

There is a third shape worth adding to that list, and it has become more common through 2026: no published price at all. Several platforms now show their tiers only after you clear an age gate and reach a checkout inside the app, which means every figure you read about them in a roundup came from somebody's individual account on an unknown date. Nastia AI states the position outright, telling visitors that "pricing is shown in the application at the point of purchase, in the user's local currency", and we took the consequences apart on our Nastia AI alternative comparison. Treat an unpublished price the same way you treat token metering: not disqualifying, but something to establish yourself before the first charge rather than after it.

Two traps worth naming, with a real example

Both of these come from Kupid AI's own paywall copy, read in August 2026, because it happens to demonstrate them together. The first is the weekly billing cadence. Kupid offers weekly, monthly and yearly, and a weekly plan priced at $12.99 sits next to a monthly plan at $29 looking like the cheaper option. It is roughly $56 a month. Whenever a companion app offers three cadences instead of two, check which one the toggle is on before you enter a card.

The second is paying to keep your own data. Kupid's cancellation screen warns that created characters, generated images, received voice messages and premium chat history are deleted 30 days after you stop paying, and offers a separate $3.99 a month charge whose only function is retaining them. That is more honest than deleting quietly, but it changes the arithmetic: your real floor is not $0 once you cancel. Ask what happens to your history before you subscribe, not after. The full breakdown is in our Kupid AI pricing and alternatives comparison.

A related pattern is memory sold as a duration rather than a feature. Kupid's tiers are labelled "48 Hours Chat Memory", "1 Week Chat Memory" and "Longtime Chat Memory", so the entry paid plan forgets a conversation from earlier in the week. If recall is the reason you want a companion at all, that line item matters more than the headline price.

A third trap is the shared coin wallet, and SoulFun is the clearest published example of it. Its subscription terms price Premium at $19.99 a month and grant 1,000 coins, then bill every action out of that one wallet: 1 coin per text message, 10 coins per minute of voice, 20 coins per minute of video. The coins are not additive, so the allowances compete. Spend the month entirely on one thing and $19.99 buys 1,000 messages, or 100 minutes of voice, or just 50 minutes of video. A single twenty minute video call costs 400 coins, which is 40% of the month, and when the wallet empties the text chat stops too. Metered pricing is not dishonest, but it is impossible to compare against a flat allowance until you convert it to cents per action, which we do in full in our SoulFun AI review.

Monthly versus annual, and the math nobody does

The annual discounts in this category are steep, steeper than typical software. Replika at $69.99 a year works out to about $5.83 a month against a $19.99 monthly rate, a discount of roughly 70 percent. Nomi at $99.99 a year is about $8.33 a month against $15.99, roughly 48 percent off. Aroused bills a year at the price of six months, so every yearly plan is half the monthly rate.

Discounts that aggressive tell you something about the business: retention on monthly plans is hard, so vendors pay heavily to lock in a year. That cuts both ways for you. If you already know you use it daily, annual is a real saving. If you are still deciding, a year of a companion you stop opening in March is the most common way people waste money here. Pay monthly for the first two months, and switch to annual only once you can point to a week where you opened it most days.

One more thing the headline hides: the tier you want is rarely the cheapest one. Products with several paid levels tend to put the longest memory and the most companion slots at the top, so the entry tier that looks like a $10 product is often not the one that delivers the experience being advertised. Compare the tier that has the features you came for, and read how recall works on our page about AI companions with memory before you assume two plans at the same price remember the same amount.

Questions people ask about AI companion pricing

How much does an AI boyfriend cost?

An AI boyfriend costs the same as an AI girlfriend on nearly every app, about $10 to $20 a month, because the subscription pays for the platform and you choose the character. Replika's App Store listing shows $7.99 to $14.99 monthly and $69.99 annual purchases, Nomi is $15.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and Character.AI's paid tier is $9.99 a month. The AI boyfriend app comparison covers which of them write a male companion well.

Is there a free AI boyfriend?

There are free tiers, but they generally cap memory and daily messages, which removes the continuity that makes a companion feel like a relationship instead of a chat window. A free tier lets you audition the writing, not the product. Aroused gives a one-time demo of 25 messages for the same purpose, then the paid plans start.

Why is Replika more expensive than Character.AI?

They sell different things. Replika is a single persistent companion with a long-running relationship model, and the subscription is the product. Character.AI is a large library of user-created characters where the paid tier mainly buys speed and early access to features, so the free experience is closer to complete.

Do AI boyfriend apps have hidden fees?

Sometimes. The common pattern is a subscription for chat plus a separate credit system for images, voice calls or video. Check whether the features you want are included or metered, because a $15 subscription with metered voice can cost noticeably more than a $20 one that includes it.

Can you cancel an AI companion subscription anytime?

Monthly plans cancel like any other subscription, though if you subscribed through the App Store or Google Play you cancel there, not in the app, which trips people up. Annual plans usually run to the end of the term. Canceling is also not the same as deleting your data, and those are separate requests on most platforms.

Is an AI boyfriend worth paying for?

It depends on whether you use it daily, because the value is continuity and continuity only accrues with use. If you have opened it twice in a month, no price is a good price. If you talk to him most days, the paid tier is where he starts remembering, and that is the part worth the money. The AI boyfriend page shows what the design choices change in the conversation.

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.