The True 3-Year Cost: Replika vs Kindroid vs Candy vs Local

Nobody adds up three years of an AI companion subscription. The charges arrive one month at a time, each one small enough to cross a bank statement without comment, and none of the seven apps I checked puts a three-year total on its own site.

So I built the page the vendors do not have. Every number below was read from the vendor’s own pages on 16 September 2026, and in the two places where no published price exists I left the space empty instead of guessing. The arithmetic assumes no price rise for three years, which is generous, and I am making that assumption on purpose.

Three years at published rates runs from $143.64 to $693.75

The short version: Candy’s twelve-month rate is the cheapest published path at $143.64 over three years, DreamGF’s annual is the most expensive at $693.75, and most of the range sits between $300 and $500 for a single app.

One year and three years, one app, no add-ons, no price increases.

These are my sums on the vendors’ published rates. No vendor published this table. Candy bills in a lump sum it discloses at checkout, so that $3.99 row is a per-month figure taken from a twelve-month payment rather than a monthly option.

Replika and Chai have no price to put in that table

The short version: Replika’s help centre states the price is shown only in the app and in the store, and a search of its entire help centre on 16 September 2026 found no figure on any of its own pages. The $19.99 Pro and $29.99 Ultra numbers you see quoted trace back to other companies’ comparison pages, not to Replika.

That is a sourcing problem, and it is worth naming as one. I can tell you what DreamGF charges down to the cent because DreamGF prints it. I cannot tell you what Replika charges today because Replika does not, and a number I cannot attribute is worse than a blank cell. Chai does the same thing.

So Replika and Chai are absent from the table above, not forgotten. If you have one open right now, your app store shows the real figure for your region and your plan, and that is the only number worth trusting.

Candy’s cheapest rate is real, and it is priced for a twelve-month commitment

The short version: Candy publishes $13.99 a month, $8.99 a month at three months and $3.99 a month at twelve months, and the free tier allows 5 messages in total rather than 5 a day. The refund window is 24 hours and closes if you used more than 20 tokens.

Candy is the cheapest three-year figure in the table and also the one carrying the most conditions. The per-month rates are honest, and they are per-month rates on lump sums you only see when the checkout screen loads.

Free does not get you far enough to test the product properly either. Five messages, once, in total. That is enough to see the interface and not enough to learn whether she remembers anything.

Kindroid’s free tier retires on 1 October 2026

The short version: Kindroid announced on 18 August 2026 that V1 and Lite retire on 1 October 2026, after which free access is read-only and daily rewards require a subscription. Until then the free tier is unlimited messages on the Lite model only, one selfie every two hours capped at two, about 5 minutes of audio in total and 2 Kindroids.

The rest of the free landscape: Character.AI still allows unlimited messaging on the free tier, with ads, slow mode at peak hours and thinner memory, and it added a c.ai Lite tier at $4.99 a month in September 2026 alongside c.ai+ at $9.99 a month or $94.99 a year against a $119.88 list. Nomi is free to start with no card, and Nomi does not publish what the free caps are.

The pattern across all of them is that free is a demo with a shrinking ceiling. Kindroid just put a date on it.

A stack of two apps clears $500 before any add-on

The short version: Character.AI annual at $94.99 plus Nomi annual at $99.99, the two cheapest annual plans here, comes to $584.94 over three years. Swap either for a Kindroid plan and the total passes $700.

Stacking is the normal behaviour, not an edge case. One app has the better voice, another draws the better pictures, so people pay both and treat it as the price of the hobby. Two annual plans at $194.98 a year is $584.94 over three years. Kindroid’s web annual plus Nomi’s annual is $719.94.

If you want the year-one version of this argument rather than the three-year one, that is what what $300 a year buys covers.

The ceiling hides in tiers that only bill monthly

The short version: Kindroid’s Ultra add-on is $24.99 a month on the web and MAX is $59.99 a month, both on top of whatever plan you already hold and both monthly only. A web annual plan plus MAX for three years is $2,579.61 by arithmetic on Kindroid’s own numbers.

$59.99 a month is $719.88 a year, which by itself is more than three years of the cheapest annual plan on the list, and it renews in twelve more charges. Nothing on any of these sites stops you from holding two subscriptions and two add-ons at once. The vendors are not hiding that. They just do not add it up for you either.

Refunds and cancellation divide these apps more than price does

The short version: Replika states all purchases are final and that deleting the app does not cancel a subscription. Candy allows 24 hours and denies the refund if more than 20 tokens were used. Character.AI says payments are non-refundable except where the law requires.

The rest of the field is quieter about it. Nomi publishes no refunds for a change of mind. Kindroid, Chai and parts of DreamGF publish nothing usable at all. DreamGF’s membership policy reserves a $1.99 a month maintenance charge on dormant, previously purchased accounts, which means an account you stopped using can still appear on a statement.

The practical difference between these apps is smaller than the price difference. The reason it matters over three years is that a subscription you meant to cancel keeps charging, and on most of these terms that is your problem to catch.

What a local app costs instead, honestly

The short version: Local Waifu is $20 once with all future updates included and no renewal, and the cost moves to your machine: 12 GB of RAM for the FLUX and Z-Image image models, 16 GB for the SDXL ones, about 30 seconds a render on the fast model against roughly 3.5 minutes on SDXL on an M3 Pro.

The license is sold through Dodo Payments as merchant of record, there is no subscription tier above it, no renewal and no account, and the trial runs 7 days without a card. There is a voluntary 30-day money-back guarantee, which is a longer refund window than most of the field gives on a subscription.

That does not make it free. If your machine has 8 GB of memory, this is the more expensive path, because the purchase you actually need is hardware, and no license fee hides that. You give up disk to the model weights, you pay the electricity, and you wait. The electricity maths is already worked out on this blog and lands in cents a month, so I will not recompute it here. The M3 Pro timing above is measured in the codebase rather than claimed by a marketing page.

What the $20 buys beyond the app is that nothing renews. Year one is $20. Year two is nothing. Year three is nothing, and no cancel button decides whether she still works. If you want to see what is inside that $20 before comparing it to a $300 year, the feature tour goes through it, and the pricing page states the whole offer in one screen.

Add up your own stack on your own currencies and your own renewal dates. That total is the only one that decides anything.

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