How Much Does an AI Girlfriend Cost? 2026 Pricing Compared

An AI girlfriend costs about $9 to $16 a month in the US in 2026. Tempted.ai is $9, Character.AI is $9.99, Candy AI and Kindroid are $13.99, and Nomi AI is $15.99. The headline price is often not what you pay: token meters, memory add-ons and app-store markups can push the real cost past $40 a month.

This page lists what each app actually charges, where the extra money hides, and what a year costs once you add it all up. Every price below was checked on July 14, 2026 against the company's own pricing page or app-store listing. Prices move, so check before you buy.

AI girlfriend pricing in 2026, compared

Two entries in that table deserve an asterisk, and they are the two people get caught by.

Candy AI's $3.99. That number is real, but it is the annual plan divided by twelve and paid up front: $47.88 today, not $3.99 today. Month to month it is $13.99. On top of the subscription, images and video consume tokens, and the plan includes 100 a month. Heavy image use means buying more.

Kindroid's $13.99. Also real, and also not the number most people end up paying. The memory context that determines whether your companion still knows you in month three is a separate add-on: Ultra costs $24.99 a month on top, MAX costs $59.99. So the configuration people actually want lands around $39 to $99 a month.

Why is Replika's price missing?

Because Replika does not publish it. There is no public pricing page, prices are shown in-app and vary by region and promotion, and the Apple App Store lists several monthly and annual options without saying which tier is which.

Anyone who gives you a single confident Replika number is guessing. Budget roughly $15 to $20 a month, and check the price inside the app before you commit.

What do you actually get for free?

Nearly every app has a free tier, and nearly every free tier is built to run out at the exact moment you start caring. That is not cynicism, it is the business model, and it is worth understanding rather than resenting.

• Character.AI gives you a genuinely usable free product with ads, slow responses at peak times, and daily caps. It has the biggest free funnel in the category and plenty of people never pay.
• Kindroid gives unlimited messages on a smaller, distilled model, so you can talk forever but not with the flagship intelligence.
• Nomi and Candy AI both cap free usage tightly, and the caps are the reason people upgrade.
• Tempted.ai runs a free demo chat on every page so you can see how she talks before creating an account, but keeping her, with persistent memory and messages she sends first, is the $9 plan.

The pattern is consistent: free gets you the conversation, paid gets you the relationship. Memory, initiative and continuity are almost always behind the paywall, because they are the expensive parts to run.

How much will you actually spend over a year?

Monthly numbers make everything look cheap. The yearly total is the honest way to compare.

• Tempted.ai: $108 a year at $9 a month, memory included.
• Character.AI: $94.99 a year if you prepay, the cheapest paid option in the table.
• Nomi AI: $99.99 a year prepaid, with everything included and no upsells.
• Kindroid: $139.99 a year for Standard, but closer to $468 a year once you add the Ultra memory tier.
• Candy AI: $47.88 a year prepaid, plus whatever your image habit costs in tokens, which is the part nobody budgets for.

The spread between the cheapest honest plan and a fully loaded Kindroid setup is roughly $400 a year. That is not a rounding error, and it is entirely invisible on the pricing pages.

If you are not sure what your subscriptions already cost you, this is a good moment to find out. Most people underestimate by a wide margin, and the quickest fix is to pull a few months of your bank statement into a spreadsheet and add up the recurring lines before you add another one.

Which AI girlfriend is the best value?

It depends on what you want, and the honest answer is not always us.

If you want unfiltered adult content or image generation, Nomi at $15.99 is the fairest deal in that group. One plan, no feature gating, no token meter, and genuinely excellent memory. You are paying more, but you are not being nickeled.

If you want to explore thousands of user-made characters and do not care much about long-term memory, Character.AI's free tier is hard to beat, and $9.99 removes the ads.

If you want video calls and deep character construction, Kindroid is the only real option, and the add-on cost is the price of admission.

If you want one girlfriend who is warm, remembers you, texts you first, and stays tasteful, $9 a month with nothing metered is the whole product, and you are not funding features you will never open. That is what an AI companion who remembers you should cost.

How to avoid overpaying for an AI girlfriend

1. Never prepay a year before testing memory. Give it two days. Tell her something specific, come back tomorrow, and see if she brings it up unprompted. If she does not remember, the price does not matter.
2. Subscribe on the web, not in the app. Apple and Google take a cut and several apps pass it straight on. Kindroid is $13.99 on the web and $15.99 in-app for the same thing.
3. Read the word "credits" as "meter." Any app selling tokens has a second bill you have not seen yet, and image generation is where it lands.
4. Check whether memory is included or sold separately. This is the single biggest hidden cost in the category.
5. Look at the annual number, not the monthly one. A $3.99 headline that is $47.88 up front is a fine deal, but it is not $3.99.

Is an AI girlfriend worth the money?

At $9 to $16 a month, an AI girlfriend costs about the same as one streaming service. Whether that is worth it comes down to whether you use her, which comes down to whether she remembers you and whether she reaches out first. An app you have to remember to open is an app you will cancel in six weeks, whatever it charges.

Test the memory before you pay, buy on the web, and be suspicious of any plan where the cheap number is not the number you will actually be billed. If you want to see how she talks first, the demo at the top of this page is free and you do not need an account.

Two more apps worth pricing before you decide

Two popular companion apps were added to this comparison in July 2026 after checking their published US App Store in-app purchase lists, and both illustrate the point above about headline prices.

PolyBuzz, still widely searched as Poly.AI, lists Standard at $9.90, Premium at $19.90 and Ultimate at $29.90 a month. The catch is memory: the company presents Long Memory as a Premium feature and Permanent Memory as an Ultimate feature, so the plan that keeps knowing you costs $29.90, not $9.90. It also sells two currencies, coins from $2.49 to $19.90 and opals at $5.90.

EVA AI does not have a single price at all. Apple's listing shows a Premium SKU at $13.99 alongside separate one month memberships at $11.99, $14.99 and $24.99, plus annual options at $47.99 and $69.99. On top of any of those it sells Neurons, an in-app currency at $9.99 for 500 and $29.99 for 2,000, which pays for gifts and media after you have already subscribed.

Both are covered in detail on the PolyBuzz alternative and EVA AI alternative pages. If you would rather run this check yourself on any app, the guide to what an AI girlfriend app really costs walks through reading an app store listing in about five minutes.

The cost nobody quotes you: what it takes to leave

Every price on this page describes what an app charges to stay. The number that decides whether a cheap plan was actually cheap is what it costs to go, and that is where the annual discounts and the currencies collect their real margin. A prepaid year is generally not prorated, so the discounted rate is only a discount if you use all twelve months. Unspent coins, tokens, neurons and opals are consumable purchases and are treated as non-refundable, so cancelling a metered plan strands whatever balance you were still sitting on.

There is also a location trap that costs people months of charges. You cancel where you paid, not in the chat app, so a plan bought through the App Store cannot be cancelled by the vendor or on their website, and deleting the app stops nothing at all. The step-by-step routes for Apple, Google and web plans are in the guide to how to cancel an AI girlfriend subscription, and the app-by-app breakdown of where each one cancels and what you forfeit is on the AI girlfriend you can cancel anytime page.

All prices verified July 14, 2026 from each company's official pricing page or app-store listing, with PolyBuzz and EVA AI added July 19, 2026 from their published US App Store in-app purchase lists. Written for adults 18 and over.