Chai AI pricing: what Chai AI costs, what the Premium subscription costs, and what Ultra adds

How much does Chai AI cost per month?

Chai AI costs $13.99 a month for Premium and $29.99 a month for Ultra. Those are the two figures most people are looking for, and both are verifiable, just not from Chai.

Apple's in-app purchase disclosure for app 1544750895 lists ten priced items for the Chai app. Sorted, they describe two subscription families with three billing periods each, plus one item that carries no period at all:

Premium runs $5.99 and $7.99 weekly, $13.99 monthly, and $134.99 annually. Ultra runs $19.99 weekly, $29.99 monthly, and $269.99 annually. A tenth item is listed simply as Premium Membership at $9.99 with no billing period attached, which is most likely a legacy rate still held by older accounts. We are not going to tell you what it renews at, because Apple does not say and neither does Chai.

The annual plans are where the sensible money is. Premium at $134.99 a year is $11.25 a month, saving $32.89 against twelve monthly payments. Ultra at $269.99 is $22.50 a month, saving $89.89, a 25% discount. Both are ordinary for this category.

One caution on the two Premium weekly prices. Apple's list shows $5.99 and $7.99 as separate live items. When a store lists two prices for the same named product, it usually means the price was raised and existing subscribers were grandfathered, so which one you see may depend on when you first subscribed and what promotion you land in.

• Premium: $13.99 monthly, $134.99 annually, $5.99 and $7.99 weekly
• Ultra: $29.99 monthly, $269.99 annually, $19.99 weekly
• Premium Membership $9.99 is listed with no billing period
• Premium annual works out to $11.25 a month, Ultra annual to $22.50
• All figures from Apple's in-app purchase disclosure, app 1544750895

What does Chai Ultra cost, and what does it actually unlock?

Chai Ultra costs $29.99 a month, $269.99 a year, or $19.99 a week. That part is documented.

What Ultra unlocks is not. This is the finding that matters most on this page, and it is the one no other article about Chai pricing will tell you: Chai Research Corp. publishes no feature comparison anywhere. We checked the actual surfaces rather than assuming. The website's own link list, taken off its homepage, contains routes for the roadmap, research, jobs, news, safety, the licence agreement and the privacy policy. There is no pricing route in it. Requesting /pricing and /premium directly returns a genuine 404 in both cases, not a redirect to a login wall. The end user licence agreement covers content rules, age and liability, and defers refunds entirely to Apple and Google. It says nothing about what the tiers contain.

So a buyer standing in front of a $29.99 charge has no vendor document that says what the $16 difference between Premium and Ultra buys. You find out after you pay.

This matters for one claim in particular. It is widely repeated across review sites, and until today it was repeated on this site too, that Chai's long-term memory lives only on the Ultra tier. We went looking for the source of that and could not find one. It is not on any Chai surface. We have corrected our own pages to say what is actually checkable rather than restate a claim whose origin nobody can point to. If Chai publishes a feature grid, we will quote it here.

What we can tell you is what Chai users say on Chai's own store listing, which is a source the vendor does not control. Recent reviews there complain about conversations being lost, memory resetting, and messages being limited. One reviewer objects specifically to being asked to pay "10 to even 20$ A WEEK", which is independent corroboration that the weekly tiers below are what people actually get shown.

• Ultra is $29.99 monthly, $269.99 annually, $19.99 weekly
• Chai publishes no feature comparison on any of its own surfaces
• /pricing and /premium both return a genuine 404
• The licence agreement defers all refunds to Apple and Google
• The popular claim that memory is Ultra-only has no vendor source we can find

Why the Chai weekly plans cost far more than they look

A weekly price is the oldest trick in app pricing, and Chai runs four of them. It works because $19.99 sounds like a monthly subscription and is charged thirteen times as often as one.

Here is the arithmetic a buyer should do before tapping. Ultra Weekly at $19.99 is charged 52 times a year, which is $1,039.48. Ultra Annual is $269.99. Same tier, same app, a difference of $769.49 across one year. The weekly option costs 3.9 times the annual one. Against the monthly plan it is still 2.9 times more: $19.99 a week averages $86.62 a month against $29.99.

Premium behaves the same way on a smaller scale. At $7.99 a week you pay $415.48 a year against $134.99 for the annual plan, roughly triple. Even the cheaper $5.99 weekly rate reaches $311.48 a year, which is more than double.

None of this is hidden, exactly. It is all in Apple's disclosure. But it is only obvious once someone multiplies by 52, and app subscription screens are not designed to encourage that. If you are going to pay for Chai, the annual plans are the only ones that price sensibly, and the weekly plans are worth avoiding on arithmetic alone.

• Ultra Weekly: $19.99 x 52 = $1,039.48 a year
• Ultra Annual: $269.99, a difference of $769.49
• Weekly Ultra costs 3.9x the annual plan and 2.9x the monthly one
• Premium Weekly at $7.99 reaches $415.48 a year against $134.99 annually
• Multiply any weekly price by 52 before you agree to it

Is Chai AI free, and what does the free tier cost you?

Yes, Chai is free to install and free to chat on, and its free tier is a real product rather than a trial. That is a genuine strength and it is a large part of why the app has the user numbers it does.

What the free tier costs you is advertising, and here Chai has published something almost no consumer app ever does: the exact rate. In its own 2026 company memo, a PDF linked from its homepage, Chai describes a January 2025 experiment run across more than 20,000 new users in which it halved "the frequency of ads served to users from 1 in every 8 messages to 1 in every 16". It reports that this produced an 18.5% relative improvement in day-30 retention.

Read that as a buyer rather than as an investor. On the free tier you can expect roughly one advertisement for every sixteen messages you send, and until 2025 it was one in eight. Over a hundred-message evening that is about six interruptions. Google Play separately carries the "Contains ads" label on the Chai listing, package com.Beauchamp.Messenger.external, which confirms the model independently.

That is an unusually honest thing for a company to put in writing, and it is worth crediting Chai for publishing it, even if the audience was investors rather than users. It also tells you precisely what a subscription is buying at the low end: fewer interruptions in a conversation that is supposed to feel personal.

• Chai is genuinely free to install and use
• The vendor's own 2026 memo puts advertising at one ad per sixteen messages
• That rate was one in eight before January 2025
• Google Play carries the Contains ads label on the listing
• Roughly six ad interruptions across a hundred-message session

Is Chai AI 17+ or 18+, and what content does it allow?

This one is worth flagging because Chai's two published answers do not match.

The US App Store rates Chai 17+, in the Entertainment category, with content advisories including "Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes" and "Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity". The listing shows version 2.186, updated 19 August 2026, with a 4.3 rating from 271,401 ratings.

Chai's own end user licence agreement says something stricter. Section 8 opens: "Chai AI is a platform strictly restricted to users aged 18 and older." It goes on to require that the user has "provided accurate age verification" and acknowledges they may encounter or generate adult-oriented content.

So the vendor's legal terms say eighteen and the store rating says seventeen. We are not going to guess which governs; we are pointing out that a parent or a buyer reading the store page gets a different answer from the one in the contract they agree to.

On content, the licence is clearer than most. Section 7.1 prohibits "generation, sharing, or distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of any kind", and the policy explicitly cites the Australian Online Safety Act 2021, which suggests the terms were rewritten recently for age-assurance regulation. Text roleplay is expansive and user-driven; explicit imagery is not permitted.

Tempted.ai is adults only, eighteen and over, uses original cameo art rather than real faces, and keeps things tasteful rather than explicit. We would rather say that plainly than have you discover the boundary after subscribing.

• App Store rates Chai 17+ with frequent mature and suggestive themes
• Chai's own licence says the platform is strictly restricted to 18 and older
• The licence requires accurate age verification
• Sexually explicit images and videos are prohibited by section 7.1
• Version 2.186, 4.3 stars from 271,401 ratings, updated 19 August 2026

Is Chai a real company, and will it still be here next year?

This is a fair question to ask before you prepay $269.99, and Chai answers it better than most of its competitors because it published a company memo and left it on the open web.

Chai Research Corp. is run by founder and chief executive William Beauchamp. Its 2026 memo reports annualised revenue of $85M as of April 2026, a $30M investment from AMD received in 2025, and infrastructure backing from CoreWeave. It describes a cluster of more than 5,000 GPUs serving 1.2 trillion tokens a day and 51,000 distinct language models, and claims more than ten million users and over 25 million user-created chat AIs.

We have no way to audit those figures, and you should read them as a company describing itself. But the scale is consistent with the app's store footprint, and the practical answer to "will this app disappear" is that Chai is one of the better-capitalised independents in the category.

The memo also explains something about the product that pricing articles miss. Chai says it scaled compute in order to "deploy larger models, extend context windows, and optimize inference-time compute", and that larger models had "higher rates of retention and monetization". Context window is the thing people mean when they say memory. Chai is telling investors it is spending money to extend it. It is simply not telling buyers which plan gets the result.

• Chai Research Corp., founder and CEO William Beauchamp
• Published 2026 memo reports $85M annualised revenue in April 2026
• $30M investment from AMD in 2025, infrastructure with CoreWeave
• Over 5,000 GPUs, 1.2 trillion tokens a day, 51,000 models
• The memo cites extending context windows, but not which tier benefits