What does an AI companion app actually cost?

How to read the table

Cost for the months you chose is the lower of two numbers: keeping the monthly plan for that long, or prepaying whole years of the annual plan. For a short stretch that is nearly always monthly. Where an app publishes both prices, the table also says from which month the annual plan pays for itself: if you are confident you will still be using it by then, prepaying is worth it.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude tax. App stores set their own price for each country, and several of these apps charge less on the web than in the app, because no store takes a cut of a web payment. Use the table to compare apps with each other, then confirm the price in your own store before you pay.

What the table cannot tell you is which plan you need. Most of these apps do not publish their limits in a way that could be turned into a number — how many messages or minutes of voice a plan buys — so the free-tier lines below are in plain words, taken from each company's own description.

What each free tier includes

YanMate

Free for good with a free account, no card: 50 messages a day and 30 credits a month for voice, calls and pictures. On the free tier: about 10 minutes of spoken replies or 5 minutes of live calls a month.

YanMate pricing page (read live from billing)

Character.AI

Unlimited messages on the basic chat styles, with ads, a 15-pin memory limit and a slow mode. Character voice and calls are described as free for all users, on a help-centre page dated 2024.

c.ai+ prices, Character.AI help centre (checked 24 Sep 2026) · About c.ai lite, and the free tier (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Character Calls and Voice FAQ (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Replika

Chatting is free for good, per Replika's help centre. Voice calls and voice messages are paid features.

Replika help centre: prices are shown in-app (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Replika help centre: is Replika free? (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Replika on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Nomi

Free accounts include daily messages and images; no card needed. Voice calls are part of the paid subscription.

Nomi on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Nomi: what free accounts include (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Nomi wiki: how voice works (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Kindroid

Unlimited messages on the smaller Lite model, two Kindroids and limited selfies; a three-day premium trial needs a card. Free accounts get about five minutes of audio in total, lifetime; subscribers get a monthly audio allowance.

Kindroid subscriptions, web and app prices (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Kindroid on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026)

PolyBuzz

Free, unlimited text chat with ads; the paid plans remove them. Character voice is limited on the free tier; members get unlimited voice listening.

PolyBuzz on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026) · PolyBuzz membership and FAQ (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Chai

Free to download and use; the free tier's limits are not published. Characters have voices, but whether voice is free or paid is not stated.

Chai on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Janitor AI

Unlimited chats with the standard models and a context window of about 9,000 tokens. Not mentioned on the janitor+ page or the subscription FAQ.

janitor+ on Janitor AI (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Janitor on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Talkie

A free tier with ads; its limits are not published. Not stated on any Talkie page we could read.

Talkie Lab on the US App Store (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Talkie terms: Talkie+ is billed monthly (checked 24 Sep 2026) · Talkie on Google Play (checked 24 Sep 2026)

Where the numbers come from

A price appears here only if we read it on the company's own website or on its official App Store or Google Play listing. Blogs, review sites and roundups do not count, even when they agree with each other. When no qualifying page names a price, the row says it is not published and links to where we looked.

We make one of the apps in this table, so read it with that in mind. Our row is the one that cannot drift, because it is read live from our billing system rather than typed in; every other row carries the date it was checked, and the page is built to fail our own checks after four months without a fresh read. For the rest of what separates these apps — accounts, memory, voice and where they are the wrong choice — see the Character.AI alternatives comparison and the Replika alternatives comparison. What YanMate itself includes at each price is on the pricing page.

Questions

Is an annual plan cheaper than paying monthly?

Only if you keep it. An annual plan is paid up front, so leaving in the third month still costs the whole year. Set the months to how long you honestly expect to stay: the table then shows whichever way of paying is cheaper for that stretch, and, where both prices are published, the month from which the annual plan pays for itself.

Why do some apps show no price?

Because we could not read one on a page the company publishes. Several companion apps sell their plans only inside the app, where the price depends on your store and country. Rather than copy a number from a blog, the table says the price is not published and links to where we looked.

Are these prices the same in my country?

Probably not. The prices here are US dollars, read from US pages. App stores set local prices for each country and often add tax, and some apps charge less on the web than in the app because no store takes a cut there. Treat the table as a way to compare apps with each other, then check the price in your own store before you pay.

How current are these prices?

Every price was read on the date shown above the table, from the page linked beside it. The page is built to go stale on a schedule: after four months without a fresh check, it fails our own build until someone reads every page again. If you spot a price that has changed, the source link is the quickest way to confirm it.

Why is YanMate's price not typed in like the others?

Because we can read it directly. YanMate's row comes live from the same billing catalogue our pricing page uses, so it can never show a price we have stopped charging. We make YanMate, so weigh our row accordingly — but it is the one row on this page that cannot be out of date.

Other free tools

• Character card viewerDrop a character card — PNG, JSON or .charx — and read every field, warning and hidden value inside it, then convert between V2, V3 and PNG. Runs in the browser; nothing is uploaded.
• Character.AI export viewerOpen the ZIP Character.AI emails you and read it: your characters as cards you can take anywhere, your chat history as plain text. Runs in the browser; the archive is never uploaded.
• Character card token counterDrop a card or paste a persona and see the token cost field by field — separating what is re-sent on every single message from what is sent once or only sometimes. Runs in the browser.
• Context window simulatorSet a context window and a character card, drag the conversation forward, and see how many exchanges the character still remembers — and at which message it starts to forget. Runs in the browser.
• Character voice analyzerPaste a character's replies or a chat transcript and see how it talks — sentence length, habits, repeated phrases — with the best replies laid out as example dialogue for a character card. Runs in the browser; nothing is uploaded.
• Character card makerFill in a form and download a real character card PNG carrying both the V2 and V3 chunks, so it opens anywhere. Any image works — a JPEG is converted in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.
• Character card templatesEight original V3 starters — mentor, rival, cozy companion, game master, language partner, study coach, noir detective, historical figure. Download PNG or JSON, or open one in the maker. Nothing is uploaded.
• Character safety checkPaste a character's persona, its greeting or a reply it gave you and check it against a published list of 30 guilt, dependency, exclusivity and minor-coded language patterns. Every finding names the rule it broke. Runs in the browser.