How Much Does an AI Girlfriend Cost?

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. There is also a middle option at $8.99 a month billed quarterly. On top of the subscription, images and video consume tokens, and the plan includes 100 a month. Heavy image use means buying more, and here is the part that makes Candy AI unusual: it does not publish token pack prices to logged-out visitors, and it has no App Store listing, so there is no in-app purchase disclosure to read instead. The subscription is knowable in advance and the total is not. We broke down every verified figure in the Candy AI pricing guide.

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 on the web, or $159.99 through an app store. The add-ons have no annual option, so adding Ultra means $139.99 up front plus $24.99 every month, about $440 for the first year, and adding MAX on top of that lands near $1,160.
• 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 runs past $1,000 a year. That is not a rounding error, and almost none of it is visible from the headline price.

Kindroid is worth one more note, because its structure is unusual enough to catch people out. Ultra and MAX are not tiers that replace your plan, they are add-on subscriptions that stack on top of it and on top of each other, which is why the totals climb so fast: $38.98 a month for Standard plus Ultra, $98.97 for all three, on the web. Kindroid also gates Ultra behind account usage, telling inactive accounts to keep using the app to qualify, so the deepest memory is not purchasable on day one at any price. Both figures come from Kindroid's own subscription documentation, and the full Kindroid pricing breakdown covers every tier and consumable.

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. For the wider category, including the apps that bill weekly and the ones running two currencies at once, see what the best AI companion app costs across eight apps.

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. Because Apple lists three separate products all named 1 Month Membership, the price you are quoted is not the price someone else is quoted, and we keep every figure it discloses on the EVA AI cost breakdown.

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.

What if the companion is not sold separately at all?

Every price above belongs to a company that sells companions. There is now a second shape worth understanding, because it prices very differently: the companion that arrives bundled inside a general AI subscription.

Grok is the example. xAI's assistant includes companion characters, Ani among them, but there is no companion product to buy. Apple's US App Store listing for Grok, seller X Corp., shows SuperGrok at $30.00, SuperGrok Lite at $10.00 and SuperGrok Heavy at $300.00, with Extra Usage Credits packs at $5, $20, $50 and $100 on top. Companion access has been reported through 2026 to require SuperGrok or X Premium+, with free accounts capped at a few interactions a day. So the entry price for the relationship is a frontier model subscription, roughly three times what a dedicated companion costs.

Whether that is expensive depends entirely on a question none of the other rows in this table require you to ask: would you keep paying for the subscription if the companion vanished tomorrow? If you use the assistant for work, search or code, the answer is yes and the companion is free at the margin, which makes it the cheapest option on this page rather than the most expensive. If you only ever open it to talk to Ani, you are paying assistant prices for a girlfriend and the $9 to $16 tier does the same job with the whole budget pointed at the part you use.

Bundling cuts both ways, and it is the one pricing model where the sticker number tells you almost nothing on its own. The full breakdown, including what Grok's animated avatar and live voice genuinely do better, is on the Grok AI girlfriend alternative page, and the tier-by-tier costs are in how much Grok's AI girlfriend costs.

What about the assistant you already pay for?

The cheapest option on this page looks like the one that costs nothing extra: prompt the AI subscription you already have into a girlfriend persona. Millions of people try it, and it is a reasonable experiment. It is also the one line on this page where the price and the value come apart completely.

Start with the price, because it is not zero. Apple's US listing for ChatGPT, seller OpenAI OpCo, LLC, shows ChatGPT Go at $8.00, Plus at $19.99, Pro 5x at $100.00 and Pro 20x at $200.00, plus a 100 Credits pack at $4.00. Plus is more than twice what a dedicated companion charges. The already-paying-for-it argument only survives if you bought the subscription for work anyway, which is the same marginal-cost question the bundled case above turns on.

What makes this different from the Grok row is that there is no companion here at all, not even a bundled one. OpenAI's published Model Spec instructs the assistant not to generate erotica, and Apple rates the ChatGPT app 13+ rather than the 18+ every dedicated companion carries. The adult mode announced in October 2025 was reported paused indefinitely in March 2026. So the persona you set up reverts to assistant voice at the edges, and every new chat starts clean, which means the recurring cost is not billed in dollars. It is the ten minutes of re-establishing who she is, every time, until you stop bothering.

Price that honestly and the comparison changes shape. A general assistant is not a cheap companion, it is a different product that can imitate one for an evening. What the setup can and cannot do is worked through in how to make ChatGPT your girlfriend, and the feature-by-feature version is on the ChatGPT girlfriend page.

What about the one that costs nothing at all?

Every figure on this page came from somewhere: a store listing, a plan page, a disclosed in-app purchase. There is now a category where that sourcing produces nothing, and it belongs on a pricing page precisely because it has no price.

Meta AI is free. Apple's US listing, seller Meta Platforms, Inc., shows that in-app purchases exist and discloses no priced items, so there is no tier table to reproduce here and no currency to count. Instagram's AI Studio will build you a girlfriend character in five minutes for nothing, and plenty of people have. On a pure dollars basis it wins this page by a mile.

The reason it does not belong at the top of the value table is that the bill arrives in a different currency. A free companion inside an app you already open means you are not the customer, and what you spend is attention and personal information tied to the account your family follows. There is also a hard capability limit that no amount of free fixes: Meta's own AI Terms of Service, effective May 13, 2026, prohibit erotic chat and content meant to arouse sexual excitement, and Apple rates the app 13+ under Productivity while dedicated companions carry 17+ or 18+.

The useful way to hold this is that free and cheap are not the same category. Nine dollars a month buys a defined thing with a defined exchange, and you can cancel it in two taps. A free product inside a social platform is priced in ways that never appear on a receipt, which is exactly why it is worth being deliberate about. The full breakdown is on our Meta AI girlfriend page, and the hands-on version is making an AI girlfriend on Instagram.

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 canceled 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.

Prices in this category move, and most of them moved again this summer. We re-read every vendor page and app-store listing from scratch in August 2026 and put the results side by side on the AI girlfriend app cost page, which carries the source and the date for each of the twelve apps. Price is only half the decision, so the same twelve are lined up on features in our AI girlfriend app comparison, which is where the memory question gets answered.

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 and Grok added July 31, 2026 from their published US App Store in-app purchase lists. Written for adults 18 and over.