Candy AI is the pick if you actually want what the phrase AI girlfriend describes: it is the only app here built for that use from the ground up, with custom characters, images and voice, and its twelve-month plan runs at 3.99 euros a month.
Replika is the mainstream alternative and the cheapest App Store year at $49.99, Character.AI has the largest free tier of any app in this comparison, Nomi sells memory as its headline feature and Kindroid holds the best App Store rating of the set at 4.78.
Whichever you pick, the billing period costs you more than the app does: the same Candy AI subscription is 3.99 euros a month over a year and 13.99 euros a month if you pay month to month. Prices were read from candy.ai on 16 August 2026 and from each US App Store listing on 15 August 2026.
The pick for each kind of user
Four of the five apps below are general purpose companion apps that tolerate a romantic persona. One, Candy AI, is designed for it. That distinction decides most of what follows, including which of them will ever show you an image of the character you built.
- Built for this use: Candy AI, which sells character creation, image and video generation and voice as its core paid features rather than as add-ons.
- Cheapest year on the App Store: Replika, $49.99 for twelve months on its lowest listed annual plan, $4.17 a month.
- Cheapest single month to try: Replika’s lower monthly plan at $7.99, then Character.AI+ at $9.99. Both stop at the end of one cycle.
- Largest free tier: Character.AI, whose free access is the reason it carries 553,248 App Store ratings, more than the other three App Store apps combined.
- Best rated: Kindroid, 4.78 out of 5 across 7,728 ratings, and the only one advertising live video calls alongside text and voice.
- Most memory-focused: Nomi, which puts memory in its tagline and gives new accounts 40 photo credits a day.
The gap between the monthly and the annual plan is 3.5x on Candy AI and 3.6x on Replika. On both, the billing period you tap moves your yearly bill further than the app you choose.
The five apps side by side
The table puts the two things you can verify before installing anything next to each other: what the cheapest twelve months costs, and what the people already using it think. Ratings come from Apple’s public app data, read 16 August 2026. Candy AI sells on the web rather than through Apple, so it has no store rating and its price is in euros.
| App | Best at | Cheapest year | App Store rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Candy AI | Custom characters, images, voice | 47.88 euros, so 3.99 a month | Not sold through Apple |
| Replika | Cheapest App Store year, largest user base | $49.99, so $4.17 a month | 4.45 from 227,731 ratings |
| Character.AI | Free tier and character variety | $94.99, so $7.92 a month | 4.28 from 553,248 ratings |
| Nomi | Memory features and image credits | $59.99, so $5.00 a month | 4.57 from 2,695 ratings |
| Kindroid | Voice and live video, best rated | $159.99, so $13.33 a month | 4.78 from 7,728 ratings |
The two cheapest years sit within a few units of each other in their own currencies, 47.88 euros on Candy AI and $49.99 on Replika, and they buy very different products. The four apps below Candy AI sell a chat subscription. Candy AI sells a media subscription with a chat attached.
Candy AI: the one actually built for this
Candy AI is the only app in this comparison whose paid feature list is the thing people search for when they type AI girlfriend. Its premium tier covers creating your own characters, generating images and video, unlimited text messages and 100 tokens a month, and the company claims 50 million users and more than a thousand ratings on its own subscription page. It is explicitly an adult product, which the other four are not.
The pricing is the clearest of the five because it is on a public page rather than inside an app store listing. Twelve months costs 3.99 euros a month, billed as 47.88 euros, and the page shows that as 70 percent off the 13.99 euros monthly rate. Three months costs 8.99 euros a month, or 26.97 euros, shown as 35 percent off. Month to month is 13.99 euros, which is 167.88 euros over a year.
Two consequences follow from selling on the web rather than through Apple. The subscription is managed in your Candy AI account instead of in iOS Subscriptions, so cancelling is a different flow from the four apps below. And the price you see depends on the currency the site serves you: our reading was in euros, and a reader served in dollars should check the figure before assuming parity.
3.99 EUR a month on the twelve-month plan, read 16 August 2026
Replika: the cheapest App Store year, and the one everyone starts with
Replika is the oldest and largest of the mainstream companion apps. Its home page counted 42,160,934 users worldwide when we read it on 16 August 2026, and it sells itself in one line: the AI friend to fall in love with. It is available on iOS and Android, which is not true of every companion app.
On price it wins at both ends of the App Store set. The cheapest listed plan is $49.99 a year, which is $4.17 a month, and the cheapest monthly plan is $7.99, so a single month of trying it costs less than a cinema ticket. The most expensive listed plan is $14.99 a month, a 3.6x spread between two routes to the same product.
What you cannot check from outside: Replika publishes no free-tier limits anywhere, on its own site or its store listing. One item on the listing, Replika Platinum at $89.99, carries no billing period, so we do not know whether it is a month, a year or a one-off, and we are not going to guess.
$49.99 a year on the App Store, the cheapest verified route
Character.AI: the biggest library, and the most honest annual price
Character.AI is the outlier in this group because it is not really a girlfriend app. It is a character platform with millions of user-made personas, of which romantic ones are a category, and it is free to use at a volume that would be a paid tier anywhere else. That is where its 553,248 App Store ratings come from.
Its paid tier, c.ai+, is $9.99 a month or $94.99 a year, a spread of only 1.3x, second only to Kindroid’s 1.2x. It is also the only case in the set where the annual discount is stated on the page rather than left for you to work out. Twenty percent off, over a struck-through $119.88.
The catch is the free tier’s shape rather than its size. User reviews on the listing complain about a time limit rather than a message count, which suggests the cap is measured in minutes per session, but a review is not documentation and we are not treating it as one.
$9.99 a month for c.ai+, and the largest free tier of the five
Nomi: memory is the pitch, credits are the bill
Nomi sells one idea, and it is on the front page: an AI companion with memory and a soul. It is the only one of the five whose marketing leads on retention rather than on romance, and it claims strong short and long-term memory on its store listing.
Its Launch Plan is $59.99 a year, $5.00 a month, the second cheapest App Store year in the set, and the Standard Plan is $99.99 a year against a $15.99 monthly SKU. Nomi is also the most generous of the App Store four about its free tier, and the only one that documents it: new users get 40 photo credits daily, and writing messages uses no credits at all.
That last detail tells you where the second bill comes from. Credits are an image budget, not a chat budget, so Nomi costs what a subscription costs until the day you start generating pictures. Whether its memory actually holds up over weeks is a different question, and we tested that separately in our look at the best AI girlfriend app for long conversations.
$99.99 a year, with credits and companion slots billed on top
Kindroid: the highest rated on the App Store, and the priciest
Kindroid scores 4.78 out of 5 on 7,728 ratings, the best of the four apps Apple carries. Its pitch is breadth of contact rather than depth of persona: quick text at lunch, long call at midnight, as its own page puts it, covering text, voice and live video calls.
It is also the most expensive annual plan here at $159.99, or $13.33 a month, against a $15.99 monthly SKU. The 1.2x spread is the narrowest of the five, so Kindroid is honest about its pricing in the same way Character.AI is: the annual plan saves you a little, not a lot.
The extras add up faster than on the other apps. Companion slots cost $3.49 for one or $11.49 for four, selfie credits $6.99 for 50 or $11.49 for 100, and there is a $14.99 audio pack. Two listed items, Ultra at $28.99 and MAX at $68.99, state no billing period, and if they bill monthly they would be $347.88 and $827.88 a year. We are not stating that as fact from an item name.
4.78 out of 5 on 7,728 App Store ratings, and the priciest of the four
What a year actually costs
Every app here sells the same subscription at two or three different prices depending on how far ahead you commit. That one choice moves your annual bill further than the choice of app does, which is why it deserves a section rather than a line in a table.
The commitment discount is the real discount
Candy AI is the clearest case because its whole grid is on one public page. The same premium tier is 3.99 euros a month if you take twelve months, 8.99 euros a month if you take three, and 13.99 euros if you take one. Over a year that is 47.88, 107.88 or 167.88 euros for an identical product, a 3.5x spread from top to bottom.
Replika runs a 3.6x spread between its cheapest and most expensive listed routes, and Nomi 3.2x. Character.AI and Kindroid are the honest outliers at 1.3x and 1.2x, where the annual plan is a modest discount rather than a different price class. The rule that follows is simple: on Candy AI, Replika and Nomi, the annual plan is the product. On Character.AI and Kindroid it barely matters.
What twelve months costs on each app
On the cheapest route, the set runs: Candy AI 47.88 euros, Replika $49.99, Nomi $59.99 on the Launch Plan, Character.AI $94.99, Nomi $99.99 on the Standard Plan, Kindroid $159.99.
On the most expensive listed route for each, the same twelve months costs Candy AI 167.88 euros, Replika $179.88, Character.AI $119.88, Nomi $191.88 and Kindroid $191.88. Pick the wrong app and you are out fifty or a hundred a year. Pick the wrong billing period and you are out a hundred and twenty on the app we rank first.
Credits and slots, the bill after the bill
The subscription is a floor, not a ceiling. Nomi sells credit packs at $4.99 for 40, $9.99 for 100, $19.99 for 225, $49.99 for 600 and $99.99 for 1,800, which is 12.5 cents per credit on the smallest pack and 5.6 cents on the largest. The small pack costs 2.2 times as much per credit as the big one.
Character.AI sells Charms packs from $0.99 to $99.99 and Replika sells gem packs from $0.99 to $19.99, but neither listing states how many units a pack contains, so there is no per-unit price to publish and we will not estimate one. Candy AI includes 100 tokens a month in its premium tier and sells more separately. If images are part of why you are subscribing, budget the extras alongside the subscription and buy the largest pack you will actually use: every one of these ladders is priced to punish small purchases.
How to choose in five minutes
Four questions settle it, in this order.
- Do you want a character you build, with images and voice? That is Candy AI, and none of the other four are really competing for it. If you want a companion to talk to, the App Store four are cheaper and less involved.
- Do you already know you want this for a year? If not, buy one month, never twelve. Replika at $7.99 or Character.AI+ at $9.99 are the cheapest honest trials, and both stop at the end of a single cycle.
- Do you want voice or video calls? Kindroid is the only App Store app of the four advertising live video next to text and voice, and you pay for that at $159.99 a year.
- Are you about to take the monthly plan on a product you will keep? Check the annual price first. On three of these five it is between three and four times cheaper per month.
One thing no comparison can price for you: a year of conversation history does not export to a competitor. Whatever you build up lives inside one company’s account, and the moment you cancel you are choosing between paying again and starting over. That switching cost is the real reason annual plans work so well here, and it is worth pricing in before you commit twelve months rather than after.
The models behind these companions are billed per million tokens at the API level. A heavy chat user does not generate anything close to $15 of tokens a month, so the subscription price is a product decision, not a pass-through of costs.
If you want the reference points behind that, we keep a comparison of what every major model charges per million tokens, and the wider category is covered in what these apps actually cost per month.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI girlfriend app is the best?
Candy AI, if you want the thing the phrase describes: custom characters, images, video and voice sold as the product rather than as extras, at 3.99 euros a month on a twelve-month plan. Replika is the better pick if you want a companion to talk to and nothing more.
Which one is the cheapest?
Candy AI at 47.88 euros for a year and Replika at $49.99 are the two cheapest, in their own currencies. Nomi’s Launch Plan at $59.99 a year is next. Everything else in this comparison costs more.
Is there a genuinely free AI girlfriend app?
Character.AI is the one people use for months without paying, which is where its 553,248 ratings come from. Nomi is the only app that documents what free gets you, at 40 photo credits a day with text messages costing nothing. Candy AI’s paid features, which are the reason to use it, are not available free.
Is a monthly plan ever the right choice?
Yes, exactly once: the month you are finding out whether you want this at all. After that it is the most expensive way to buy the same thing. On Candy AI the monthly route costs 167.88 euros a year against 47.88 euros committed up front.
What happens if I stop paying?
On the four App Store apps, the subscription is cancelled in the iOS Subscriptions settings rather than inside the app, and cancelling stops the renewal without ending the period you already paid for. Apple does not prorate a cancelled annual subscription, so an annual plan is only the cheap option if you stay the year. Candy AI is billed on the web, so its cancellation happens in your account on the site.
What we verified and what we did not
Verified: Candy AI’s three plans and their discounts, read from its public subscription page on 16 August 2026; the in-app purchase names and prices on each of the four App Store listings, read 15 August 2026; the ratings and rating counts in Apple’s public app data, read 16 August 2026; and the claims each company makes on the pages captured above.
Not verified, and therefore not asserted anywhere: whether Candy AI shows the same figures in currencies other than the euro; the price of the App Store subscriptions bought on each company’s own website, which is routinely different because Apple takes a commission, and which we read at the source for Character.AI only; per-tier message or token caps; whether memory persists on any free tier; and prices in any country other than the United States for the App Store four. We did not open a paid account on all five, so nothing here ranks conversation quality: this comparison is built on what each company publishes and what its users rate it. The protocol we apply to every comparison is written up in how we check our figures.
Three listed App Store items were excluded from this comparison because the listing states no billing period for them, and a subscription price without a period is not a price: Replika Platinum at $89.99, Kindroid Ultra at $28.99 and Kindroid MAX at $68.99.
Prices in this category move often. Everything here was read on 15 and 16 August 2026 and should be checked at the source before you buy. Some links on this site are affiliate links, described in full in our affiliate disclosure; they pay us nothing extra from you and they did not affect a single figure or ranking above, all of which come from published data.