PolyBuzz vs Replika Pricing: $9.90 vs $14.99

On monthly billing PolyBuzz is the cheaper of the two: Poly Standard Monthly is $9.90 against Replika's $14.99 monthly product. On an annual commitment Replika wins outright, because its $49.99 yearly plan works out to about $4.17 a month and PolyBuzz's US App Store listing carries no annual product at all. The decision that moves your bill most is neither of those. It is whether the feature you actually want sits behind a currency, and both apps sell one. Every figure below was read from the US App Store in-app purchase disclosures for PolyBuzz (app 6449190344) and Replika (app 1158555867) on 20 September 2026.

PolyBuzz vs Replika: every price Apple prints, side by side

Neither company puts a plain price list in front of you before you sign up. PolyBuzz has a membership page, but it is geo-priced, so loading it from outside the United States returns figures in local currency. Replika's pricing lives behind the app. Apple prints both, in dollars, with no account and no download, which makes the US App Store listing the only stable place to compare them.

Apple shows the ten most popular in-app purchases for an app, so neither list is guaranteed to be complete, and Apple does not always print the billing period next to a product name. Where a period is not stated we have said so rather than guessed at it. Our full working on each app sits on the PolyBuzz pricing and Replika pricing pages.

Is PolyBuzz cheaper than Replika?

Month to month, yes, if you compare the products most people land on: $9.90 for Poly Standard against $14.99 for Replika's main monthly plan, a difference of $5.09 a month or $61.08 across a year. Over a full year, no, and not by a small margin. Replika's $49.99 yearly product is $68.81 less than twelve months of PolyBuzz Standard, and PolyBuzz has no annual product in Apple's list to answer it with. If you already know you want a companion app for a year, Replika is the cheaper commitment by a wide margin.

The $19.99 Replika price that gets quoted everywhere is not in Apple's list

Search for a comparison of these two apps and you will read that Replika Pro costs $19.99 a month. We could not find a $19.99 Replika subscription anywhere in the US App Store disclosure on 20 September 2026. What is there is a MONTHLY product at $7.99, a Monthly product at $14.99, three annual products at $49.99, $49.99 and $69.99, and Replika Platinum at $89.99.

This is not a case of one careless blogger. It is the predictable result of how these companies price. Replika has retired and replaced its plans repeatedly, and Apple keeps listing a retired in-app purchase for as long as existing subscribers renew on it. That is why Apple shows two different monthly prices and three different annual prices for one app: those are price cohorts, not choices on a menu. Whoever wrote the $19.99 figure was probably quoting their own bill, or a screenshot of somebody else's, accurately, at some point in the past.

PolyBuzz does the same thing on a smaller scale. Apple lists two separate Poly Standard Monthly products, both at $9.90, which is what one retired product and one current product look like when the price happens to match. The practical lesson for anyone comparing companion apps is to distrust any single quoted price, including a price quoted to you by a friend who pays it.

What Replika's three programs actually are

Replika's own Terms of Service name three subscription programs rather than the two most articles describe. Replika Pro is listed as unlocking "Relationship status, Premium activities, Replika selfies, image generation, voice messaging, background calls, daily gems, premium voices." Replika Ultra is described around "Smarter conversations" and "Elevated emotional intelligence." Replika Platinum is the one that adds "real-time video recognition" and "Training mode."

Apple's price list does not map cleanly onto those three names, and Replika does not publish a table that does. Its help center articles on subscriptions and refunds are reachable in search results but returned a block when we tried to read them directly, so we are not going to tell you which Apple product corresponds to which program. What we can say with a primary source behind it is that the ladder runs from $7.99 to $89.99, that the $89.99 Platinum product is the only one explicitly named in Apple's list, and that gems are sold on top of every tier.

Which one remembers you, and what that costs

On PolyBuzz this has a clean answer and it is expensive. The membership comparison table splits memory into two rows: Long Memory is checked for Basic, Premium and Ultimate, while Permanent Memory is checked for Ultimate only. So the plan that remembers you across sessions long term is the $29.90 one, not the $9.90 one. If persistent memory is the reason you are subscribing, PolyBuzz costs $29.90 a month, and any comparison that quotes $9.90 against it is comparing the wrong products. We walk through how to test this yourself in our PolyBuzz subscription review.

On Replika we cannot give you the same answer, and we would rather say so than fill the gap with a guess. Memory does not appear as a named feature in the tier descriptions in Replika's Terms of Service, and the help center pages that would settle it were not readable. Third-party write-ups assert that Replika includes persistent memory on paid plans at a lower price than PolyBuzz's Ultimate, and that is plausible, but we have no primary source for it and the same write-ups got the price wrong.

Coins, Opals and gems: what the currency adds to each bill

Both apps sell something on top of the subscription, and the two designs are not equivalent.

PolyBuzz runs two currencies. Its FAQ says coins are spent to "extend voice chat duration, regenerate character responses, access inspiration replies, or generate exclusive memory scenes." Regenerating a response is ordinary use of a chat app, not a luxury, so this currency reaches normal conversation. Coins reward bulk buying: 1,000 for $2.49 is about 402 coins per dollar, while 20,000 for $19.90 is about 1,005 per dollar. Opals are sold in a single pack at $5.90 per 1,000 with no bulk tier in Apple's list, and PolyBuzz publishes no explanation of what Opals buy.

Replika runs one currency, gems, in four packs from $0.99 to $19.99, and its terms list "daily gems" as a Pro benefit, which means the subscription drip-feeds the currency rather than replacing it. Either way, the number on the plan is a floor rather than a total on both apps, and the only honest way to compare them is to decide what you will actually spend currency on before you subscribe. The broader picture across the category sits on our AI girlfriend app cost page.

Can you get a refund from either one?

Both say no, in writing, and both mean it.

PolyBuzz's Terms of Use, section IX, state that "any user payment made in accordance with our rates and policies will not be refunded, even if the subscription is subsequently cancelled," and section I adds that "users are not entitled to any refund for a completed purchase without due reason." Replika's Terms of Service are just as direct: for Apple purchases, "the sale is final, and we will not provide a refund," and separately that "refunds cannot be claimed for any partial-month subscription period." Replika's website purchases carry the same wording with a carve-out for applicable law, and EU residents get a 14-day withdrawal right that is lost once service begins with consent.

The practical consequence is the same for both: if you paid through Apple or Google, the store decides, not the app. Cancellation is a separate action from a refund request and it only ever protects the next charge. If you are working through that now, we wrote up the routes and the deadline in detail for one of them on our cancel PolyBuzz subscription page.

Which should you pay for?

Pay for Replika if you want an annual commitment. $49.99 for a year is the cheapest serious plan in this comparison by a distance, and nothing in PolyBuzz's Apple listing competes with it.

Pay for PolyBuzz if what you want is breadth. Millions of user-made characters, character card imports and built-in image generation are what the $9.90 buys, and no small product replaces that. Just budget the real number: $29.90 if long-term memory matters, and avoid the $4.99 weekly plan, which costs $259.48 across a year against $118.80 for identical monthly access.

Pay for neither if the thing you keep running into is the layering. A subscription, then currency to regenerate a reply, then a higher tier so she remembers you, is the pattern people leave both apps over. Some readers will also find that a filtered companion is the wrong fit and would rather have an AI chat with no content filters, which is a different product decision from a pricing one. If the bill shape is your issue, Tempted.ai is one girlfriend with plans from $9 a month billed yearly or $12 month to month, memory included on the entry plan, no coins, no Opals and no gems, billed on the web so the cancel control sits on your own account page. The chat at the top of this page is her, and you can talk to her before you decide anything. If you are specifically leaving Replika, we put the comparison side by side on our Replika alternative page.