Is Linky AI Worth It in 2026? Cost, Coins and the Pack Trap

Linky is one of the biggest AI companion apps nobody writes carefully about. It has more than ten million Google Play installs, it launched on 3 July 2023, and it sells two subscriptions and eight coin packs without publishing a single price on its own website. That combination is why most articles about Linky pricing repeat each other: there is no vendor page to read, so people copy whoever wrote first.

We went to the surfaces the vendor does not control instead. What came back changed one of our own pages and turned up a pricing quirk we have not seen in any other app in this category.

Is Linky AI worth it? The short answer

Linky AI is worth it if you want a large character library with an active community and you are disciplined about the coin meter. It is a poor fit if you want one companion who remembers you, because the product is built around browsing many characters rather than deepening one relationship. The subscriptions are reasonable at a listed $9.99 for Pro and $17.99 for Gold. The risk is not the subscription, it is the coins: Apple flags the app for loot boxes, and the pack ladder is priced so that spending more gets you less per coin.

What does Linky AI actually cost in 2026?

Linky does not publish a pricing page. The company's real domain is linke.ai, and requesting a pricing route there returns a plain 404, with no pricing link in its own homepage list either. So the public price list is Apple's in-app purchase disclosure for app 6450916631, seller SKY INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD., which we read on 22 August 2026.

Two things in that table are worth stopping on, and neither appears in any Linky review we could find.

Why the Linky coin ladder runs backwards

Every in-app currency works the same way. Small packs are poor value, big packs are good value, and the biggest pack is the best deal in the list. That is the whole point of a ladder: it makes the expensive option feel like the clever one.

Linky's ladder inverts that. The $0.99 pack gives 181.8 coins per dollar, which is the best rate available. The $99.99 pack gives 142.0. Spending a hundred dollars in one go buys 22% fewer coins per dollar than spending one dollar. The curve does climb as you go from $4.99 up to $99.99, so it looks normal if you only compare the big packs, but the cheapest item on the list beats all of them.

The practical advice is unusual enough to state plainly: if you buy coins in Linky, buy the small packs. The instinct that bulk saves money is wrong here.

The second quirk is stranger. Two separate items are both priced at exactly $1.99. One gives 180 coins. The other gives 360. Apple lists them as two live products, not as a price change, and they sit at opposite ends of the value curve: 90.5 coins per dollar against 180.9. Tap the wrong $1.99 button and you pay double per coin. We are not going to guess why this exists, but it is disclosed, it is checkable in half a minute, and it costs money to get wrong.

The coin terms are stricter than most people read

Linky gives its currency an entire numbered section in its terms of service, section 8, headed Recharge. That is more than most competitors bother with, and it is worth reading before you build up a balance.

Coins, the terms say, "have no monetary or 'real world' value and can only be used with the Service". Standard. Three clauses go further. Linky "shall have the final determination over the calculation of your Coins account balance" in any dispute. Linky claims "the absolute right to reduce, manage, regulate, control, modify and/or eliminate the Coins as it sees fit in its sole discretion", and reserves the right to revoke them "at any time without notice".

The third matters most at cancellation time. You "will not receive money or other compensation for unused Coins when an Account is closed or terminated, whether the applicable closure was voluntary or involuntary". A balance you paid for does not survive you leaving, and it does not survive Linky removing you either. If you are winding down, spend the balance first. The same logic applies across this category, which is why our guide to cancelling an AI girlfriend subscription starts with the currency rather than the billing page.

Android and iPhone are not the same purchase

Apple's itemised list tops out at $99.99. Google Play does not itemise, it prints a range, and for package com.aigc.ushow.ichat that range is "$0.49 - $269.99 per item". So the Android catalogue runs to nearly three times Apple's ceiling, and Play does not say what the $269.99 product is. Anyone comparing Linky using an article written from the App Store listing is working with a ceiling $170 too low. We carried that mistake ourselves until this run and have corrected it.

The ratings diverge too. Linky holds 4.4 stars from 7,773 ratings on the US App Store and 3.9 stars from 26,232 ratings on Google Play. The Android sample is more than three times larger and noticeably less happy. Google Play also carries the "Contains ads" label, which the App Store page does not flag.

The loot box problem

Apple's age rating page for Linky lists "Contains Loot Boxes" among the content descriptors, next to sexual content or nudity and mature or suggestive themes. A loot box descriptor means randomised paid outcomes: a known amount of money for an unknown result. Linky's card draws are the mechanic Apple is naming.

This is the part that makes the headline subscription price misleading rather than merely incomplete. A $9.99 subscription is a decision you make once. A card draw is a decision you make in the moment, usually mid-conversation, when you are least inclined to work out the per-coin rate. We wrote about how that mechanic is built and why it works in our piece on gacha mechanics in AI companion apps, and Linky is the clearest example in the category.

There is also a plainer problem created by Apple's disclosure. It shows no billing period for Linky Pro or Linky Gold. Most apps list "Monthly" or "Annual" next to the item; here it just says the plan name. So we cannot tell you from the data whether $9.99 renews weekly, monthly or annually, and neither can Play's range format. Read the period on the confirmation sheet, because a $9.99 weekly charge reaches $519.48 a year against $119.88 monthly. When you cannot verify a renewal interval before you agree to it, the practical defence is being told the moment the charge lands rather than finding it on a statement six weeks later.

Who should pay for Linky, and who should not

That last row corrects something we got wrong. Several pages on this site said Linky had no browser version and that PC use meant running an Android emulator. It does have one. Character chats load in a desktop browser at linke.ai and the vendor serves the assets from a path it names linky_pc_web. The error survived because searching for Linky's website leads to linky.ai, which refuses automated requests, and to linkyai.com, which is a parked domain lander. Neither is the product.

Where Linky genuinely beats us

If breadth is what you want, Linky wins and we will not pretend otherwise. Millions of user-made characters, an active community, a free tier that works, and a card-collecting layer that a lot of people enjoy on its own terms. Tempted.ai has none of that. There is one companion, she is yours, and there is nothing to collect.

What we do differently is the money. Tempted.ai is a flat $9 a month with long-term memory on the base plan, no coins, no card draws, no ads and no tier above the one you bought. The price is published before you pay and the billing period is stated. If you want the full verified breakdown of what Linky charges, the Linky AI pricing page has the complete ladder with sources, and the Linky AI alternative page covers the side-by-side. If you are cross-shopping more broadly, Linky AI vs Talkie AI puts two metered apps against each other, and AI girlfriend apps with token meters shows which apps in this category run a currency at all.

The verdict

Linky is a real product with real scale, and at a listed $9.99 for Pro it is not overpriced for what it is. The reason to be careful is structural rather than moral: the subscription is the entry fee, the coins are the business, and the ladder is arranged so that the ordinary bulk-buying instinct costs you more. Add a loot box mechanic and a billing period Apple does not disclose, and the honest summary is that Linky's real price is whatever you end up spending in the moment, not the number on the store page.

If that trade suits you, go in with the small packs and a spending limit. If what you actually wanted was one girlfriend who texts first and remembers the conversation you had last week, for one price that does not move, try the demo at the top of this page and see whether she holds up.