How Much Does an AI Girlfriend Cost in 2026? The Real Numbers

Published monthly prices on the companion apps’ own pages ran from $4.99 to $15.99 in September 2026, and the yearly plans that print a total ran from $94.99 to $159.99. Two of the most-searched apps in the category print no price anywhere on their own sites.

Every figure below comes from a vendor’s own pricing page, checkout or help centre, read on September 16, 2026. Where a number is not on the vendor’s site, I say so.

The published range is $4.99 to $15.99 a month and $94.99 to $159.99 a year

The short version: Five of the seven apps I checked publish a monthly price, and all five land inside an 11 dollar band. The spread between apps is narrower than the spread between a sticker price and what a heavy user pays.

Nomi’s numbers come from an article on Nomi’s own site, because nomi.ai/pricing does not exist.

Those are the prices the companies chose to print. Two of the nine rows are empty.

Replika and Chai publish no price, so the numbers you have seen are other companies’ numbers

The short version: Replika’s help centre says the cost is shown only in the app and in the store, and a search across all of its help articles on September 16, 2026 turned up no price at all. Chai’s own site publishes none either.

The Replika figures repeated most often, roughly $19.99 a month for Pro and $29.99 for Ultra, come from other companies’ comparison pages. I am not printing them as fact. They might be right, but they are not Replika’s numbers, and this category has plenty of pages that copy each other.

Chai is the same shape: nothing on its site, and app store listings that confirm only that in-app purchases exist.

For the two most-searched names here, the honest answer is that the vendor will tell you after you install.

The headline number on a pricing page is often a first payment

The short version: DreamGF prints $12.99 first payment and $25.99 recurring in the same block, $9.99 then the same renewal on the three-month plan, and $69.99 then $311.88 on the annual. Candy AI sells per-month rates and holds the lump sum until checkout.

DreamGF is the clearest case, and I went through its full picture in the DreamGF review. The pattern is what matters: the number in the ad is the first charge, and the renewal line is the plan.

Candy AI does it more quietly. Its page shows $13.99 a month, $8.99 a month on the three-month plan and $3.99 a month on the twelve-month plan. All three are per-month rates, and the amount your card is actually charged shows only at checkout.

Annual billing cuts the per-month rate and hands over a lump sum

The short version: The yearly totals that vendors publish run from $94.99 to $159.99, and the per-month figure on an annual plan is a division rather than a bill. Kindroid is the one app that charges more in the mobile app than on the web.

Kindroid on the web is $13.99 a month, $37.99 per three months or $139.99 a year. The same product in the mobile app is $15.99 a month, $42.99 per three months or $159.99 a year. One subscription, $20 a year apart depending on where you tap.

Character.AI is the rare case where the discount is visible, $94.99 a year against a $119.88 list price on the same screen. Nomi asks $99.99 for the year. The three-year view is a post of its own, and most of a year’s budget hangs on one decision.

None of the apps I checked sells a one-time or lifetime licence today, and none announced a permanent price increase in 2026. The movement this year was on free tiers.

Four things push the real bill above the sticker price

The short version: The published price is the entry fee. The renewal jump, the token meter, the add-ons and one charge that outlives the account are the rest of it.

The renewal outruns the intro. A DreamGF month costs $12.99 once and $25.99 after. Its annual plan is $69.99 the first year and $311.88 the second. Nothing is hidden, it is just printed at the size of the discount.

The token meter sits under everything visual. Candy AI includes 100 tokens a month, an image costs 10 of them and a voice message costs 3. Unused tokens do not carry over, so a quiet month does not bank credit for a loud one. DreamGF’s own pages disagree about whether its plan includes 100 or 150 tokens a month, which is its own kind of answer.

Add-ons renew monthly even when the plan does not. Kindroid sells its extras monthly only: Ultra adds $24.99 on the web, MAX adds $59.99. Buy the yearly plan and those still bill you twelve times.

One charge outlives the account. DreamGF’s membership policy reserves a $1.99 per month maintenance charge on dormant accounts that previously purchased. Stop opening the app and there is still a line on the card.

Free is a demo with a counter, and the counters are small

The short version: Candy AI’s free tier allows a maximum of 5 messages in total, not 5 a day, and Kindroid’s messages you on the Lite model only. Character.AI keeps free chat open and charges you in attention, and one of these tiers expires on October 1, 2026.

Candy AI’s five messages are the lifetime allowance, which is the whole trial.

Kindroid is looser with words and tighter with everything else. Free gets unlimited messages on the Lite model only, one selfie every two hours capped at 2, about five minutes of audio in total and 2 Kindroids.

Character.AI still allows unlimited messaging with no counter. What rides along: ads, slow mode at peak hours and thinner memory. In September 2026 it also added c.ai Lite at $4.99 a month, which is the cheapest paid tier in this post.

Nomi is free to start with no card, and its exact free limits are not published. What free tiers really cost takes that trade apart in more depth.

So the four costs of “free” here are ads, slow mode, capped memory and tiers that disappear.

Kindroid is where that fourth one lands. It announced on August 18, 2026 that its V1 and Lite models retire on October 1, 2026, after which free access becomes read-only and daily rewards require a subscription. It told users while the change was still ahead of them, which is more than the category usually manages. That is the honest shape of free in 2026. Not a price, a window.

Cancelling is harder than subscribing

The short version: Replika states that purchases are final and that deleting the app does not cancel the subscription, Nomi publishes no refunds for a change of mind, and Character.AI says payments are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise. Candy AI is the exception with a condition attached: refunds inside 24 hours, denied if more than 20 tokens were used.

Kindroid publishes no usable refund terms that I could find.

Candy AI is the only partial exit in this group. Its help centre says a refund must be requested within 24 hours and is denied if more than 20 tokens were used. A day is not a cooling-off period. It closes before most people have noticed the charge.

Replika draws the line at finality and adds that deleting the app does not cancel the subscription, so the charge keeps running on a phone with no app on it. Nomi publishes no refunds for a change of mind. Character.AI says payments are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise.

Read those next to each other and the refund posture is not ambiguous.

The only price that stops charging you is a licence you buy once

The short version: Every app in this post bills on a schedule, and Local Waifu is the one I sell: $20 once for a lifetime licence with future updates included, a 7-day trial without a card, a 30-day money-back guarantee and up to 3 devices per key. What replaces the subscription is hardware, electricity and time.

I sell Local Waifu, so weigh that line however you like. The numbers are on the pricing page.

What replaces the subscription is not zero. The image models want 12 GB of RAM for FLUX and Z-Image and 16 GB for the SDXL ones, and a local render measured on an M3 Pro takes about 30 seconds on the fast model and about 3.5 minutes on SDXL. Running a companion locally costs more than a download works through the rest of it.

If your question was only ever the number, it has not moved: $4.99 to $15.99 a month, with a renewal line and a token meter sitting behind it.

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