What You Are Actually Paying For: The Anatomy of AI Companion Pricing

Ryan is 33, manages a hardware store outside Boise, and subscribed to a companion app on a Sunday for $9.99 because that was the number on the button.

By the second Thursday, the chat still worked and everything else had stopped. Asking for a picture brought up a purchase screen. So did the voice note. He had not done anything unusual. He had used the product the way the marketing showed it being used, and it turned out the $9.99 had bought one of the two things he thought he was buying.

He was not scammed. The terms were on the page and he did not read them, which is what everyone does. But the deeper problem is that even people who do read the page usually cannot tell what they are looking at, because the pricing in this category has a shape, the shape is the same almost everywhere, and nobody explains why it is like that.

So here is the explanation, including our own numbers, because the arithmetic is not embarrassing and the vagueness is what costs people money.

Two Products Wearing One Price Tag

An AI companion app is selling two things with completely different cost structures, and once you see that, every pricing page in the category becomes legible.

The first is text. When you send a message, the app runs your conversation through a language model, and the cost of that is measured in tokens. A long evening of chat costs the company a fraction of what your coffee cost. Not free, and it adds up across a large user base, but per user per day it is small, stable and predictable.

The second is pixels. A photo means a diffusion model running on a rented GPU for a number of seconds. Video is the same thing with a multiplier on it, because a clip is many frames and each one is work. Voice is somewhere in between: cheaper than images, and unlike images it is billed by how long it is, so it scales with how much you use rather than how many times you press the button.

The gap between those two costs is not a rounding error, it is orders of magnitude. A company can eat the text of a heavy user for a year without noticing. A company cannot eat unlimited video for one heavy user for one month, because that user alone can generate a GPU bill larger than anything he is plausibly paying.

That single asymmetry produces the entire shape of pricing in this category. Flat fee for the cheap and predictable half, metered currency for the expensive and unbounded half.

Which Is Why Unlimited Always Means Words

Read any companion app's pricing page with that in mind and the word unlimited stops being a claim and starts being a location marker. It sits next to chat, messages or conversation. It never sits next to video, and when it appears near images there is a quiet qualifier nearby: standard quality, or fair use, or a daily number.

This is not a trick, or at least it does not have to be one. It is the only structure that can work. An app offering genuinely unlimited media at a flat monthly price is either throttling somewhere you have not found yet, or is subsidising heavy users out of a funding round and will change the terms once that stops. Both of those end the same way, with the offer quietly getting worse for the people who liked it most, which is an unhappier experience than a metered price you understood from the start.

So when you see unlimited, the useful question is not whether to believe it. It is: unlimited what, and what is the other half?

The Second Currency Is Not a Trick, But It Is Not Neutral

Coins, gems, tokens, credits. Different names, one mechanism, and it exists for a real reason: the underlying cost genuinely varies by action, and a currency is the honest way to pass a variable cost through to the person choosing to incur it.

It would be dishonest to stop the explanation there, though, because a currency does something else as well. It puts a layer between the action and the dollars. Spending 25 coins does not feel like spending $1.25, and it is not supposed to. That is true of arcade tokens, casino chips, airline miles and every in-game currency ever shipped, and it is true here. The distance is the point, and it is worth knowing that the distance is working on you.

The fix is not to avoid the products that use a currency, because that is all of them. The fix is to convert it back once, before you buy, and then never think about it again. Work out what a coin actually costs you in cents at the tier you are on, multiply it by the thing you will do most, and decide whether the real number is fine. Ninety seconds of arithmetic, and it defuses the whole mechanism.

Price Your Own Month, Not the Headline

The mistake nearly everybody makes is comparing the big numbers on two pricing pages. Those numbers are the least informative thing on either page, because they are buying different bundles of two products you value differently.

Do this instead, and do it before you open any pricing page.

Write down your month. Not the maximum, not the fantasy, the realistic version: roughly how many evenings you will actually use this, and what you will do on them. Then split it into the four things that get billed separately everywhere in this category. Messages. Photos. Voice, whether that is notes or live calls. Video, and be honest, because most people want video far less often than they expect and a few want it constantly.

Now price that month on each pricing page you are considering. You will find the ranking flips depending on which line dominates. A text-heavy reader with one picture a week wants the cheapest subscription that includes unlimited chat and almost no media allowance. Somebody whose whole interest is images wants the opposite, and will be better off on a higher tier or buying media in bulk even if the headline number looks worse.

Same two products, opposite answers, and the pricing page cannot tell you which one you are. That is the part you have to bring.

Worked Example, With Our Own Numbers

Concrete is better than abstract, so here is ours, current as of this writing, with the pricing page as the authority if anything has moved since.

Chat is unlimited on every paid tier. Before you pay anything, you get 5 messages a day with no account at all and 30 a day once you sign in, which is enough to find out whether a given character does anything for you.

Media comes out of coins, and coins are priced per action:

The subscriptions bundle a monthly coin allowance with the unlimited chat:

The arithmetic worth doing is the per-coin one, because it tells you where the value actually sits. Bought on their own, coins run from about 15 cents each in the smallest pack down to about 5 cents each in the largest. Inside a subscription, Casual works out near 6.7 cents a coin, Closer near 5.7, and Exclusive at 5 cents, which is the best rate available anywhere on the page, and the unlimited chat is on top of that rather than instead of it.

Which produces a genuinely useful conclusion and not a sales pitch: if you are going to spend money here at all, the subscription tiers are where the coins are cheapest, and topping up with small packs is the most expensive way to buy the same thing. If you only want to talk and you almost never want a picture, the cheapest tier is the right answer and the higher ones are money spent on an allowance you will not use.

Four Things That Are Not on Any Pricing Page

These are the questions that decide whether a plan is actually good, and they are answered in the terms rather than on the page. Ask them of anyone, including us.

Does the intro price renew at the intro price? Discounted first months are standard and fine. A first month at a third of the price that renews at full price is a different product from the one you think you bought. Find the renewal number before the card goes in.

Do unused allowances roll over? Usually not, and that is normal, but it changes how you should use them. Ours do not: coins included with a subscription are granted for that billing period and expire with it, while coins bought in a pack do not expire at all. So the allowance is a use-it-or-lose-it monthly budget and a pack is a balance that sits there. Neither is a trap, but they are different instruments and it is worth knowing which one you are holding.

What happens when a generation fails? Models refuse, and jobs fail. The question is whether the currency comes back. On our side a failed media job refunds the coins automatically rather than leaving you to notice and write in. If an app cannot answer this question clearly, that is the answer.

What does cancelling do to your balance? Sometimes nothing, sometimes everything. Ask before you are annoyed rather than after.

When You Want the Whole Field at Once

Everything above is a method for evaluating one pricing page properly. It does not solve the other problem, which is that there are dozens of these apps and pricing them one at a time is an afternoon.

That is what the comparison sites are for, and the ones worth using are the ones that score what a plan actually costs in practice rather than reprinting the headline number. Best AI Companions, an independent AI companion review site, runs a consistent rubric across the apps it covers with real pricing as one of the scored categories, alongside things like memory and conversation quality, and publishes shortlists cut by what a person is actually looking for. Using a site like that to narrow sixty apps to three, then doing your own month's arithmetic on those three, is a much better use of an evening than reading sixty pricing pages. Just apply the same scepticism you would to any review, which is covered in how to read an AI girlfriend review before you pay.

The Short Version

You are buying two products. One is cheap to serve and gets sold flat, one is expensive to serve and gets metered, and every pricing page in this category is that fact wearing different branding.

Decide which of the two you are actually here for before you look at any numbers, convert the currency back into cents once so it stops working on you, and check the four questions that live in the terms rather than on the page. Then spend accordingly, which for a lot of people is less than they were about to.

The free tier is enough to find out which kind of user you are, and that is the only input the arithmetic needs. Browse the character roster, spend a few evenings before spending anything else, and notice whether you keep reaching for the camera or never think about it. Wren Malloy is a heavily tattooed Portland tattoo artist and tends to pull the visual half of this out of people, while Kira O'Connell is a 38 year old paramedic with a dry wit who is mostly a talking proposition. Which of those two evenings you enjoy more is worth more than any pricing table, including the ones above.