The Real Monthly Cost of AI Companion Apps in 2026

How I calculated the real monthly cost

Three usage profiles, one month, prices taken from each platform’s own checkout, help centre or App Store listing on 22 September 2026, in USD. I did not use my own card statements as evidence here, because a statement proves what I did, not what you will do. What you can redo is arithmetic, so every figure in the main table is a sum you can check against the unit prices quoted in the text.

The profiles are deliberately modest. Most people who pay for a companion app chat every day, ask for a picture now and then, and try voice once or twice. The heavy profile is what a keen user does, not a power user who scripts the API.

Three rules governed the numbers. First, I always price the cheapest plan that unlocks the feature, so if images require a higher tier, the “chat + images” column shows that tier, not the entry tier plus a note. Second, when a platform sells extras in packs, I buy the smallest number of packs that covers the shortfall, at the smallest pack size, which is the way a cautious person tops up. Third, if a unit price exists only behind a login or only on third-party sites, the cell is marked unconfirmed and the text explains which number I borrowed. Our full method for testing, including the three conversation scripts and the week-long memory check, is on How we test, and our rules for what counts as evidence are on the editorial policy page.

One more note on prices. Candy AI’s checkout showed me euros the first time and dollars the second, with identical digits, so I quote the dollar figures. Kindroid publishes different prices for web and app-store purchases; I use web unless stated. Nastia’s terms say all payments are in US dollars.

The real cost table for all 10 platforms

Two platforms cost exactly their sticker price under every profile: Kindroid at $13.99 and Nomi at $15.99. Everything else either climbs a tier or starts a meter. The table below is the whole guide in one place; the sections after it show the arithmetic behind each cell.

The pattern is simple once you see it. Apps that sell a currency (tokens, Moments, coins, Hearts, credits) are cheap to enter and expensive to use. Apps that sell a tier (SpicyChat, Nastia) are cheap to enter and jump in steps. Apps that sell a plan with everything inside (Kindroid, Nomi) cost more on day one and the same on day thirty. Our ranking of the best NSFW AI chat apps weighs this against conversation quality; this page only weighs the money.

Where the extra money goes

Image credits are the biggest single source of the gap, voice minutes are the fastest, and daily limits are the quietest. Below is each mechanism with the per-platform numbers behind it, so you can see exactly where a $13.99 plan becomes a $64 month.

Image tokens, Moments, coins and credits

Six of the ten platforms sell images through a currency, and the price per image ranges from roughly 10 cents to 30 cents once you work it back to dollars.

Secrets AI is the most transparent. The official wiki lists a standard image at 50 Moments, a 2K image at 100, an audio call at 50 Moments per minute, an adult video at 600 and a custom character at 500 (the first one free). Premium grants 8,000 Moments a month for $19.99, so 60 images is 60 × 50 = 3,000 Moments and fits inside the grant with room to spare. The heavy profile is where it breaks: 150 images × 50 = 7,500 Moments, plus 100 call minutes × 50 = 5,000, totals 12,500 Moments against an 8,000 grant. The wiki’s own top-up example is 4,000 Moments for $11.99, which with the Premium 10% bonus becomes 4,400; you would need two packs ($23.98) to cover the 4,500 shortfall, making the month $43.97. The Ultimate tier at $39.99 comes with 15,000 Moments, which covers 12,500 outright, so the table shows $39.99 as the cheaper route. Note that grant Moments do not roll over; purchased Top-Up Moments do.

Candy AI is the least transparent of the token apps, because the pack prices only appear after you log in. The subscription page confirms the plan: $13.99 a month, or $8.99 a month on the quarterly ($26.97) and $3.99 a month on the annual ($47.88), with “unlimited text messages” and “100 tokens per month”. What a token buys is not on any page I could open. Third-party pricing write-ups consistently quote packs from $9.99 for 100 tokens up to $299.99 for 3,750, and about 2 tokens per image, with voice calls drawing roughly 3 tokens a minute; treat all three as unconfirmed. On those numbers, 60 images is 120 tokens, 20 more than the grant, so you buy one $9.99 pack: $13.99 + $9.99 = $23.98. Heavy use is 150 × 2 = 300 tokens for images plus 100 × 3 = 300 for voice, 600 in total, 500 over the grant, which at the smallest pack is 5 × $9.99 = $49.95, for a month of $63.94. A larger pack would shave that, but its price is unconfirmed too. Candy’s terms add the sting: tokens “must be used within their billing period” and expire on cancellation.

Joyland is metered but generous at the level most people use. The official help centre prices an on-demand image at 30 credits, Standard at 5,000 credits a month with 20 image messages a day, and Premium at unlimited credits and unlimited images. Sixty images is 1,800 credits; 150 is 4,500, still inside the 5,000 grant and inside the 600-a-month daily cap. That is why Joyland stays at $9.99 in every column of the table. The catch is the monthly price itself: the help centre labels $9.99 and $19.99 as early-bird rates against list prices of $19.99 and $39.99, and the free tier has dropped to 10 credits a day, which is a third of one image. My full notes are in the Joyland review.

Kalon AI publishes the grant but not the tariff. The landing page confirms 16,000 coins a month on the $19.97 plan and 200,000 coins a year on the $119.64 annual (about 16,667 a month), plus 50 free coins a day on the free plan. Nowhere on the site, FAQ, prompt guide or changelog could I find how many coins an image, a video or a voice message costs, and the coin packs referenced in the terms have no visible prices. The table’s “$19.97 if 60 images fit” is therefore an assumption, not a calculation. On the plus side, the changelog for 20 September 2026 says failed generations now refund coins automatically.

Kindroid and Nomi meter images only at the margin. Kindroid’s Standard plan carries a “10x selfie cap” over the free tier’s one selfie every two hours, and paid selfie credits ($9.99 for 100 on the web, $11.49 in the app stores) exist mainly to skip the queue on repeated requests. Nomi’s App Store listing sells Nomi Credits in packs from 40 for $4.99 to 1,800 for $99.99, but Nomi’s own pages describe the image allowance as daily and included; the figure of 40 image credits a day comes from user reviews, not from Nomi, so it is unconfirmed. CrushOn’s pricing page does not mention image generation at all, which is why the table cannot compute its image columns.

Voice minutes

Voice is where the sticker price can multiply by ten, and where the two flat-rate apps look best.

Secrets AI charges 50 Moments a minute on the official wiki, so 100 minutes is 5,000 Moments, more than half the Premium grant. Swipey’s help centre says calls are “billed per minute in Hearts” and that the rate is “shown once before your first call”, but it never prints the number. Independent pricing pages report 30 Hearts a minute and packs of 50 Hearts for $9.99, 520 for $49.99, 1,150 for $99.99 and 2,760 for $209.99; all unconfirmed. If those are right, 100 minutes is 3,000 Hearts, and after the 200 Hearts a month that the terms of service promise every subscriber, you would still need 2,800: either the 2,760 pack at $209.99 plus a little, or two 1,150 packs and a 520 pack at $249.97. That is how a $7.99 plan becomes a $220 to $260 month, and it is the single biggest gap in this guide. Swipey’s help centre does note that purchased Hearts never expire and that daily rewards and quests pay out free Hearts, which softens the light-use case but not the heavy one.

Kindroid documents its voice economics in unusual detail. Subscribers get one million complimentary audio credits a month, with 1,000 characters equal to roughly one minute of audio, so about 1,000 minutes of V2 speech. Calls add a running charge of 400 credits per minute on top of the speech itself, and the newer V3 voice bills at 1.5 times V2. For the heavy profile, 100 minutes of calls costs about 100 × 1,000 + 100 × 400 = 140,000 credits, or 190,000 on V3, either way well inside the grant. If you ever run out, extra credits are $11.99 for 500,000 characters on the web ($14.99 in the app stores), which Kindroid says is sold at break-even.

SpicyChat’s voice is text-to-speech on replies, not calls, and it lives on the $29.95 I’m All In tier with no per-minute meter documented. Nomi includes voice messages and calls in the subscription, with no per-minute price on any page I found. CrushOn’s pricing page offers “up to 70% off on PRO voice generation” to subscribers, which tells you voice is metered without telling you the base rate.

Energy, daily caps and message credits

Daily limits do not show up on the bill; they show up as the moment you upgrade. Secrets’ free tier is 20 messages a day, tied to the device so a second account does not reset it. Nomi’s free plan is widely reported at 50 messages a day, though Nomi’s own site only says “daily messages and images”, so the number is unconfirmed. Kalon gives 50 coins a day, Joyland 10 credits, Nastia a daily token allowance whose size the official pages do not state (third-party sites say 200), and Swipey’s terms limit unregistered trial use to a handful of messages.

CrushOn is the platform where message credits matter even after you pay. Its Standard plan carries 2,000 message credits a month, Premium 6,000, Luxe 20,000, Elite 55,000 and Imperial 125,000, but credits are only consumed by Pro and Ultra models; the free models are unlimited on every tier. The escape hatch is a “Pro Chat Package” at $24.99 a month ($299.99 a year) for unlimited Pro-model access, and the page says most Pro models still require a membership underneath it. The old Deluxe “unlimited” plan is marked retired. SpicyChat has no message cap on any tier; what it meters is context, at 4K on Free and Get a Taste, 8K on True Supporter and up to 32K on I’m All In, which is a quality limit rather than a quantity limit.

Annual traps

An annual plan is a bet that the app will still be the app in eleven months, and 2026 has shown how that bet goes wrong. SpicyChat raised every tier on 8 September 2026: Get a Taste from $5.00 to $5.95, True Supporter from $14.95 to $19.95 and I’m All In from $24.95 to $29.95, with annual prices moving to $60, $199.95 and $299.95. Existing subscribers keep their old price only “as long as you keep it active and don’t change plans”; switch billing cycle, lapse a payment, or downgrade and the grandfathering is gone. Secrets AI retired its Lite and Plus tiers and is moving those subscribers to Premium at their next renewal with 14 days’ notice. CrushOn retired Deluxe. Joyland’s headline prices are labelled early-bird against list prices twice as high.

The discounts themselves are real and large: Candy AI’s annual works out at $3.99 a month against $13.99 monthly, a 71% cut; Nomi’s $99.99 a year is $8.33 a month against $15.99; Secrets’ Premium annual is $109.99, or $9.17 a month against $19.99; Kindroid’s $139.99 a year is $11.67 against $13.99; Kalon’s $119.64 is $9.97 against $19.97; CrushOn’s Standard annual is $58.88 against a struck-through $79.88. None of them refund unused months. That is why the rule in the next-but-one section is a paid month first, annual second.

Auto-renew and the trial that converts

Every platform in this guide renews automatically, and three of them say so in capitals. Nomi’s terms: “YOUR ACCOUNT MUST BE CANCELLED BY YOU BEFORE THE SUBSCRIPTION PERIOD RENEWS”. Kindroid’s legal page: paid services “will be automatically extended for successive renewal periods of the same duration”. Candy’s checkout, under every plan: “Cancel any time. Renews automatically for the same price and term.”

Kindroid’s 3-day premium trial “requires a payment method on file and auto converts into a subscription if not cancelled within the trial period”, though Kindroid does email a reminder a day before. Kindroid’s docs also warn that if you hold Ultra or MAX and cancel the tier beneath it, you keep paying for the add-on while the service level drops. Nomi’s cancellation policy says deleting the app does not cancel anything, and that app-store subscriptions must be cancelled through the store. These are not hidden fees, but they are the reason “I only meant to try it” turns into a second charge.

App-store markups and currency

The same plan costs up to 14% more when you buy it through Apple or Google, and Kindroid is the only platform that prints both prices side by side. Its help centre lists Standard at $13.99 a month, $37.99 a quarter and $139.99 a year on the web against $15.99, $42.99 and $159.99 in the app stores; the Ultra add-on is $24.99 on the web and $28.99 in-app, MAX is $59.99 against $68.99, and every credit pack carries the same gap ($9.99 web versus $11.49 in-app for 100 selfie credits, $11.99 versus $14.99 for 500,000 voice characters). Nomi’s prices in this guide come from its App Store listing because nomi.ai itself shows no numbers until you sign in, so a web checkout may differ; I could not confirm either way. Candy AI showed my checkout in euros with the same digits as its dollar prices, which at any exchange rate where a euro is worth more than a dollar means European buyers pay more in real terms, and Nastia’s terms fix all payments in US dollars regardless of where you are. Kindroid and Kalon both warn that regional pricing and exchange rates apply outside the US. If you have a choice, buy on the web. Our adult content policy explains which of these platforms we cover and how we describe them.

The flat-rate apps

Kindroid and Nomi are the only two platforms whose heavy-use month equals their chat-only month, and Joyland’s Standard plan behaves like a flat rate for anyone under 20 images a day.

Kindroid’s $13.99 web price (or $15.99 through the app stores) buys unlimited flagship-model chat, a selfie allowance ten times the free tier’s, one million audio credits, video calls, custom voices and ten Kindroid slots. Everything else is priced as an optional one-time purchase with the number printed in the help centre: $9.99 for 100 paid selfie credits, $11.99 for 500,000 voice characters, $9.99 for four extra slots. The Ultra ($24.99) and MAX ($59.99) add-ons exist, but Kindroid gates them behind “significant interaction history” and describes them as break-even memory tiers, not upsells; the full stack is $98.97 a month on the web and you have to earn the right to buy it. The Standard plan also has a quarterly at $37.99 and a yearly at $139.99, with unused paid credits carrying over month to month.

Nomi’s $15.99 Standard plan (App Store: $39.99 quarterly, $99.99 yearly) includes unlimited messaging, up to ten Nomis, group chats, voice messages and calls, selfies and art. The credit packs on the App Store listing, 40 for $4.99 up to 1,800 for $99.99, are for exceeding the daily image allowance or adding slots, and Nomi’s own description of the allowance is “daily”, not a monthly meter. The only unconfirmed number is the allowance’s size. The trade is that Nomi has no cheaper tier: you are at $15.99 or you are on the free plan.

Nastia’s Unlimited plan at $15.99 works the same way once you are on it, promising unlimited messages, unlimited selfies, voice messages and video generation on the official product page. The reason it is not in the flat-rate group is the tier beneath it, sold “from $6.69/mo” on annual billing according to Nastia’s own comparison page, which keeps a daily token allowance; the monthly price of that tier, and how many tokens an image costs, are not on any page I could open. SpicyChat is flat within a tier too, but the tiers are the meter. If predictability matters more to you than the loosest filter, the flat-rate pair also lead our ranking of the best AI companion apps, and Joyland’s Standard plan is the budget pick in our list of Character.AI alternatives.

How to keep the bill flat

The cheapest month is the one where you pick the currency you will actually spend and refuse to buy the others. Here is what my spreadsheet says works, in order of how much money it saves.

1. Decide your profile before you subscribe, not after. If you are a chat-only person, SpicyChat at $5.95 or CrushOn on annual at $4.91 is the whole answer, and you should ignore every tier above it. If you want images, go straight to a plan that includes them (Kindroid, Nomi, Joyland Standard, Nastia Unlimited, Secrets Premium) rather than buying a cheap plan and feeding it packs.
2. Buy the plan, not the pack. On Secrets, the heavy profile costs $43.97 on Premium plus two top-ups and $39.99 on Ultimate. On Candy AI, five small packs cost $49.95; if the larger packs are priced as third parties report, one would be cheaper. Packs are priced for people who did not plan.
3. Pay for one month first, then annual. A month of Kindroid costs $13.99 and tells you whether you will still be using it in March. An annual plan bought from the free tier costs $139.99 and tells you nothing until it is non-refundable.
4. Know the meter’s unit price before your first call. Swipey shows its per-minute rate once, before the first call, and never again in the help centre. Secrets prints the video cost on the Generate button. Write both down.
5. Turn off auto-renew the day you subscribe if the platform allows it (Kindroid lets you opt out under Billing) and set a calendar reminder for the others. Kindroid’s trial converts after three days; Nomi and CrushOn both state that a late cancellation is a charge you will not get back.
6. Cancel from the place you bought it. Nomi, Joyland and Kindroid all route app-store subscriptions through Apple or Google, and Kindroid’s legal page hands app-store refunds to the store entirely. Web purchases are usually cheaper anyway: Kindroid’s app price is $15.99 against $13.99 on the web.
7. Watch the tier names. Nastia has renamed its plans repeatedly, Secrets retired two, CrushOn retired one, and SpicyChat repriced three in one week. If a plan name in this guide does not match the checkout, the checkout wins; our contact page is where to tell us.
8. Check what the charge will look like. Secrets bills as “S LABS INC” and Swipey uses a neutral descriptor by design; both help centres say so. That is good for privacy and bad for spotting a renewal you forgot. Our privacy scorecard covers the rest of what these companies do with your data.

Cancellation and refund policies by platform

None of the ten platforms offers a no-questions refund on a subscription, and only Candy AI publishes a fixed refund window. Everything below is quoted or paraphrased from the official terms, help centre or policy page linked in the Sources section.

• SpicyChat. Terms say prices can change “at any moment” and the refund section only invites you to “contact us” if you are not satisfied. Cancelling keeps benefits until the end of the billing cycle. The September 2026 FAQ warns that a lapsed or changed plan loses the old price.
• CrushOn.ai. “We will not issue refunds of usage fees.” Billing is monthly and in advance; cancellations “must be submitted before your next billing date” and a missed cancellation “will not be refunded”. No partial refunds for mid-cycle cancellation or downgrades, and the terms ask you not to charge back except for fraud.
• Kindroid. No prorated refund for the current term; cancel from Settings, then Billing. In-app purchases (selfie credits, voice credits, slots) are explicitly non-refundable. App-store purchases are refunded, if at all, by the app store. The 3-day trial converts automatically.
• Candy AI. Cancel any time from Settings; access continues to the end of the period. Non-EU users can request a refund within 24 hours of payment if they have used 20 tokens or fewer, card purchases only. EU and UK users have a 14-day withdrawal right minus a prorated deduction for use. Unused tokens expire on cancellation.
• Nomi AI. “All payments are nonrefundable”; no refunds for partial months, downgrades or unused time, with discretionary exceptions. Cancel before the renewal date through the platform you bought on; deleting the app does not cancel. Downgrading to free makes voice, group chats and video read-only.
• Joyland AI. Terms: “all fees are non-refundable to the fullest extent permissible under applicable law” and “refunds cannot be claimed for any partial-month or partial-annual subscription period”. Cancellation only through the payment partner you bought from; the account drops to Free at the end of the paid period.
• Nastia AI. The Digital Fulfillment and Refund Policy says purchases are non-refundable “except where required by law or where a technical error prevented delivery”. Cancel from the account; it takes effect at the end of the current paid term. All payments in US dollars.
• Kalon AI. “All payments are final and non-refundable” except where law requires. EU users have a 14-day withdrawal right that ends once any paid feature is used. Kalon commits to 30 days’ notice before subscription price changes. Coins are non-refundable and expire if the account is terminated.
• Secrets AI. Cancel any time from Settings, then Manage Subscription; full access continues to the end of the period and the account then moves to Free. “Cancellation stops future charges but does not issue a refund for the current billing period.” Grant Moments reset monthly; purchased Moments never expire. Failed payments are retried and may downgrade the account.
• Swipey AI. Terms: “All purchases are final and non-refundable, except where a refund is required by mandatory applicable law.” The help centre softens this to case-by-case human review for accidental or duplicate charges. Cancel under Settings, then Subscription; plan changes take effect next cycle. Purchased Hearts do not expire while the account is active.

If a company’s own page contradicts a cell in the table above, the page is right and we are out of date; the editorial policy explains how corrections work and the affiliate disclosure explains which of these links pay us, which does not change the numbers.