I thought comparing prices would be simple. Test the free versions, note the subscription number, pay for the most practical plan on each platform, line them up in a table, done. Then the payments actually went through, and the table stopped making sense: tokens on one app, credits on another, image charges, premium models that meter by the message, introductory prices that quietly double. So this page answers the question my spreadsheet couldn’t: what are you actually paying for when you subscribe?
The platforms I paid for (so far)
Everything below comes from my own accounts and my own card. I tested each platform’s free tier first, then bought the plan that best fit what I wanted to test there, which was not always the cheapest one. Here is the roster:
| Platform | What I bought | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Candy AI | Premium monthly | $13.99/mo |
| Nectar AI | Monthly, 5,000 credits | $12.99/mo |
| GirlfriendGPT | Premium tier | $15/mo |
| Chai AI | Weekly plan | $9.99/wk |
| DreamGF | Monthly, intro offer | $12.99, then $25.99 |
| Replika | Pro monthly | $19.99/mo |
| SpicyChat | The image-capable tier | $14.95/mo |
| Kindroid | Monthly, Ember unlimited | $13.99/mo |
| Nomi AI | Monthly, once checkout cooperated | $15.99/mo |
One platform is still missing from this list because it won’t take my money; that story gets its own section below, because failed checkouts turned out to be part of the pricing picture too. And one row above nearly didn’t make it: Nomi rejected my card for three straight days before suddenly accepting it.
Free doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere
Before paying anywhere, I ran every free tier as far as it would go, and the range surprised me more than the subscriptions did.
Some free plans were basically a teaser
Candy gave me around five messages. Nectar managed about eleven, GirlfriendGPT about ten, Chai about eleven, and DreamGF let conversations run a little longer before locking them behind the paywall. Candy was the most instructive of the group: once the allowance was gone, I couldn’t simply switch characters and keep exploring, the wall followed me around the app. Five messages is not a trial. It is a trailer.
Others let me do surprisingly much without paying
SpicyChat let me chat extensively for free. Character.AI’s free chat is effectively unlimited, which is half the reason it dominates its category. Nomi was generous with conversation and even threw in free selfie generations. The lesson I took from the spread: don’t evaluate “free” by whether a free tier exists. What matters is how much of the actual experience you can test before the paywall, and that ranges from five messages to functionally forever.
The subscription price is only the starting number
This is the part no pricing page told me. $13.99 at Candy doesn’t mean total usage is unlimited. 5,000 Nectar credits doesn’t mean 5,000 messages. $19.99 at Replika doesn’t mean all the customization is unlocked. A Chai subscription doesn’t mean every image after subscribing costs nothing. Every platform splits its pricing into three layers: the subscription price, what that price actually includes, and what still costs extra on top. The next section is what each layer looked like on my own accounts.
Paying doesn’t always mean unlimited
Candy gave me 100 tokens
My $13.99 subscription came with 100 tokens. Selfies consume tokens; the video I generated cost 12 of them. When I looked at topping up, another 200 tokens cost $9.99, almost as much as my original monthly subscription. That reframed the whole plan for me: the subscription buys the chat, and the tokens are a second product wearing the first one’s name.
Nectar gave me 5,000 credits
At first, 5,000 sounded generous. Then a photo took 250 credits, and Orchid, the premium model, took 20 credits per message. I wasn’t deliberately trying to burn the balance; I was enjoying one conversation, and when I next looked, it had gone from 4,750 to 3,405 without my noticing. That is the danger of metered pricing done smoothly: nothing interrupts you while you spend.
Replika still wanted gems and coins
I paid $19.99 for Replika Pro and still didn’t receive the currency needed for some of the avatar customization I wanted. The subscription and the store are separate economies, and Pro is a ticket to the first one only.
Chai’s “unlimited” images had a catch
On Chai, my subscription came with three free images per day; past that, additional generations ran $0.12 each in what I encountered. Not expensive, but not the same thing as included, and the difference only shows up after you subscribe.
Credits were the most confusing part of all of it
100 tokens vs 5,000 credits tells you almost nothing
Candy gives 100. Nectar gives 5,000. DreamGF gives 160. Lined up in a table those numbers look like a ranking, and the ranking is meaningless, because each platform prices its actions in its own currency at its own rates. A 250-credit photo on Nectar and a 12-token video on Candy can’t be compared until you know what one unit buys, and no platform leads with that math.
Premium models can quietly burn through a balance
The Orchid conversation taught me the real lesson: the number of included credits matters less than how quickly normal use consumes them. A generous-sounding balance attached to a 20-credit-per-message model is a small balance. If a platform offers premium models, the first thing worth checking is not the model quality but the meter attached to it.
Images are where the extra costs started adding up
Across my accounts, images were the clearest dividing line between the advertised price and the real one. Candy: selfies and videos consume tokens. Nectar: 250 credits for the photo I generated. DreamGF: 160 tokens included, and unlocking a photo cost 2. Chai: three included images daily before the per-image charge. And on SpicyChat I specifically chose the $14.95 plan because the $5 tier didn’t include the image experience I wanted to test at all. Someone who mainly chats will experience these platforms as fairly priced subscriptions. Someone who wants images and videos is shopping in a different store with the same sign over the door.
The cheapest plan wasn’t always the plan I actually needed
SpicyChat is my main example in one direction: it has a $5/month option, and based on what I wanted to test, that plan simply wasn’t for me, so I paid $14.95 for the tier with chat images. GirlfriendGPT gave me the opposite experience: the first price I saw was $50/month, and only by digging through the tiers did I find the $15 Premium level, the cheapest one that covered what I actually needed. Same lesson from both directions: don’t ask “what’s the cheapest subscription?” Ask “what’s the cheapest subscription that includes what I actually want?”
Those huge discounts aren’t always what they look like
Candy’s discount changed, but the price didn’t
I saw 63% off when I first subscribed. Later the banner said 70% off, and as far as I could tell the actual price was the same. The discount is marketing weather; the number after it is the climate.
DreamGF’s $12.99 was only the first month
I thought $12.99 on DreamGF was surprisingly cheap, and it was: it turned out to be a 50% introductory offer, with renewal at $25.99. The price today and the price next month aren’t necessarily the same number, and only one of them is on the button.
How I actually buy these subscriptions now
Annual plans look cheaper, but I don’t start there
Every platform advertised an annual plan with a much lower effective monthly price, and I consistently chose the shorter subscription anyway. The reasoning is simple: I’m testing something I don’t yet know whether I like. Saving money per month doesn’t help if I’m committing a year to a product I stop using after two weeks. My rule: try free, buy the shortest reasonable plan, and only then decide whether a longer subscription makes sense.
I cancel right after subscribing
Chai made this one concrete. I bought the weekly recurring plan and cancelled it the same minute, keeping full access through August 8. That’s now part of my routine on every platform: cancel immediately, keep the period I paid for, and never discover a forgotten renewal on a statement three weeks later. On a weekly plan especially, forgetting costs you every seven days.
Sometimes I couldn’t pay even when I wanted to
Paying turned out to be a feature that doesn’t always work. Nomi rejected my card with an acquirerBIN error, the same card that worked everywhere else, three days in a row, before the checkout suddenly accepted it and Nomi graduated onto the paid list above. Character.AI is the one holdout: my card was declined at the paid tier, with a suggestion to try a debit card instead, and so far it has stayed declined. I include this for honesty’s sake: every platform on the roster above took my money, one still refuses it, and I’m not pretending otherwise in either direction.
What actually appeared on my bank statement
I check this on every platform now. Candy bills as “EverAI LIMITED,” which is discreet. DreamGF as “Dream AI,” reasonably quiet. GirlfriendGPT as “NDAI.CC,” a string that could be anything on earth. Replika bills as REPLIKA, plainly itself, and Nomi, once its checkout finally cooperated, bills as NOMI.AI. And SpicyChat delivered the twist: it bills as NDAI.CC too, the exact same name as GirlfriendGPT, two platforms sharing one line on a statement. The full table of biller names lives in my lessons post; the short version is that some platforms clearly think about how they appear on a statement and some have never considered it.
Did paying actually make the experience better?
Price is only half the question. Here is what actually changed after each payment, on the four platforms where the answer taught me something.
Candy: a clear difference. Premium felt like an actual level up from what the teaser free tier hinted at. Kindroid: paying opened additional settings and newer models on Kindroid without requiring credits for every message, which is exactly the shape of upgrade I wish more platforms sold. Replika: much harder to justify. I paid $19.99 and wasn’t sure I could tell enough of a difference for what I personally wanted. SpicyChat: paying opened the image experience I’d chosen the plan for, although getting NSFW image generation working required finding another setting first. The pattern across all four: price alone doesn’t determine value. What changes after paying does.
What I check before paying now
Everything above has collapsed into a routine. Before any subscription, I now answer these, in roughly this order:
- How far can I actually get for free?
- What’s the shortest subscription available?
- What does that plan actually unlock?
- Do I receive credits or tokens, and what consumes them?
- Are normal messages unlimited?
- Are the better models metered?
- Are images included or separately charged?
- Is the displayed price introductory, and what’s the renewal price?
- Can I cancel immediately and keep the period I paid for?
- What will the charge look like on my statement?
That’s the entire methodology, and every line of it was paid for.
So, what should you actually expect to pay?
My experience says there are really two prices. The first is the price of getting through the paywall. The second is the price of using the features you actually care about. If you mainly want to chat, the subscription is close to the full cost, and most of these platforms are honestly priced for you. If you frequently want images, videos, or premium models, the subscription is the entrance fee, and the real spending starts inside. What people across the market actually pay, and how many pay at all, is in my AI girlfriend statistics; this page is just what the inside of those numbers felt like on my own card.
The prices came from somewhere: my living reviews.
Every platform in this post has its own review diary with dates, screenshots, and receipts, and the side-by-side comparison of all of them is on my homepage. The scores from my first paid week are in my field notes.