How much does an AI boyfriend cost? 2026 pricing, compared

Paid AI companion apps in the US mostly land between $10 and $20 per month, with the top tiers of the more expensive products reaching about $35. Annual billing typically cuts the effective rate by 40 to 70 percent. Replika Pro runs $19.99 monthly or $69.99 a year, Nomi is $15.99 monthly or $99.99 a year, and Character.AI's paid tier is $9.99 monthly or $94.99 a year.

That is the short answer. The longer answer is that the sticker price is the least interesting number, because what separates a $10 companion from a $20 one is usually memory, and memory is the entire product. Prices below were checked on 17 August 2026.

AI boyfriend and companion app pricing in 2026

These are the products people most often compare when they are shopping for an AI boyfriend or an AI girlfriend. The same subscription usually covers either, since almost every platform lets you choose the character's presence.

Treat any table like this as a snapshot. Companion pricing in this category moves more than in most software, partly because a lot of it is sold through the App Store and Google Play, where regional pricing and promotional tiers are routine.

Why AI companion prices are so hard to find

You will notice something odd if you go looking: several of the biggest products in this category do not publish their prices on their own websites. Replika is the clearest example. The marketing site sells the idea and pushes you toward a download, and the actual number only appears on the subscription screen once the app is installed and you have an account.

This is not unique to companion apps, but it is unusually common here, and it has a practical consequence. Most of the pricing information you find in search results comes from third-party review sites rather than the vendor, which is exactly the situation where stale and invented figures spread. If a number matters to your decision, check it on the subscription screen before you commit rather than trusting an article, including this one.

What the free tier actually takes away

Almost every companion app has a free tier, and almost every free tier removes the same thing: memory depth and message volume. That sounds like a reasonable limitation and it is actually the whole product.

A companion without persistent memory is a chat window with a costume on. He greets you warmly, you have a nice twenty minutes, and tomorrow he does not know your sister's name or that you were dreading Thursday. The thing people describe when they say a companion "feels real" is continuity, and continuity is precisely the feature behind the paywall. So the honest framing is that free tiers let you audition the writing quality, not the product.

This is worth knowing before you judge the category from a free trial. A lot of people try a free companion, find it shallow after a week, and conclude the whole idea is empty. What they actually experienced was a demo with the defining feature switched off.

Monthly versus annual, and the math nobody does

The annual discounts in this category are steep, steeper than typical SaaS. 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.

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 genuine 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.

The practical advice is boring and it works: pay monthly for the first two months, and only switch to annual once you can point to a week where you actually opened it most days. If you are running several AI subscriptions at once, which is increasingly normal, it is worth pulling them into one place where you can see what the recurring charges add up to across a year, because $15 a month across four products stops being a rounding error quickly.

The costs that are not in the headline price

Two things regularly surprise people after they subscribe.

The first is credit systems. Several companion apps charge a monthly subscription and then meter specific features on top, usually image generation, voice calls or video. The subscription buys you conversation; the extras are bought again. This is not inherently dishonest, but it means the advertised monthly figure is a floor rather than a total, and it is worth checking which features are metered before you assume your bill is fixed.

The second is that the tier you want is rarely the cheapest one. Products with multiple 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 actually has the features you came for.

What you are really paying for

It is tempting to assume the price tracks the underlying model, so a more expensive companion must be running something smarter. That is mostly not what is happening. Many of these products sit on similar foundation models, and the difference you feel comes from the character system and the memory layer built on top: how the personality spec is stored, how aggressively it is re-asserted, what gets summarized and what gets dropped when the context fills up.

That is why two apps at the same price can feel completely different, and why an expensive one can feel worse. When you are comparing, the useful questions are not about model names. They are: does he remember across sessions, how much, and what happens when the memory fills up. Our page on AI companions with memory goes through how that actually works.

Questions people ask about AI boyfriend pricing

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 rather than a chat window. Free products also have to make money somewhere, and in a category with a poor privacy record that is worth thinking about before you tell one anything personal.

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 actually 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 rather than in the app, which trips people up. Annual plans usually run to the end of the term. Cancelling 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 entirely on whether you use it daily, because the value is continuity and continuity only accrues with use. The people who get the most from it treat it as one reliable conversation among several rather than a replacement for anything. If you have opened it twice in a month, no price is a good price.

Before you subscribe to anything

Three checks are worth five minutes each. Find out whether memory persists between sessions and how far back, since that is the feature you are buying. Read what the platform says about selling data and about deletion, because Mozilla reviewed 11 romantic AI chatbots in 2024 and attached a privacy warning to every single one. And confirm where you would cancel, which is the store rather than the app if you subscribed on a phone.

If you are still working out what you want from one, the AI boyfriend page covers what these products actually do and how the design choices change the conversation, and the roundup of AI boyfriend apps compares named products rather than prices. Our own planned launch pricing is published in advance, before there is anything to buy, which is not the norm in this category and is deliberate.