AI girlfriend apps: the honest map, dollnerd.

More people go looking for an "AI girlfriend" than for every robot-companion and doll term put together. There is no single "best" one, because they are not one product. They are five different product types wearing the same two words.

The market answering that search is a gold rush: hundreds of apps, most of them the same white-label chatbot in different anime art, plenty of them built to charge you before you notice what is missing. Free is real in exactly one corner. And one fact governs every dollar you spend: the girlfriend is a subscription, and a subscription can be changed, filtered, or deleted by the company that owns her. That has already happened to hundreds of thousands of people.

The five categories

AI girlfriend apps mapped by price and how permissive they are

1. Mainstream companion apps. Replika (Luka, Inc.) is the original, launched November 2017, and now claims over 42 million users. Nomi sits in the same lane. These are memory-first and wellness-branded. They also filter hard: on Replika, romantic-partner mode and voice calls live behind Pro (about $19.99/month in 2026), and if you downgrade, "relationship status reverts to friend."

Three companion personas of the memory-first kind Replika and Nomi sell. The whole pitch of this category is a partner who remembers you, which is exactly what the paywall and the filter can revoke.

2. Roleplay platforms. Character.AI (founded 2021 by two ex-Google engineers, roughly 20 million monthly users) and Talkie (by MiniMax's Singapore vehicle Subsup, 50M+ Play downloads) are giant character libraries, not girlfriends per se. c.ai+ is $9.99/month or $94.99/year, verified on Apple's listing 2026-07-25. Both filter explicit content. Chai and PolyBuzz are the looser cousins.

Three character personas of the sort that fill a roleplay library. On Character.AI or Talkie you pick from millions of these rather than build one girlfriend, and both platforms filter explicit content.

3. NSFW girlfriend builders. Candy AI, DreamGF (DreamAI SRL, Bucharest), and Secrets AI (Secret Labs Inc., a Dover, Delaware shell address) let you build one photoreal partner with image and voice generation on consumable tokens. DreamGF's live table runs Bronze $9.99 to Diamond $99.99 a month, plus tokens on top. Read the token math before you commit.

A photoreal partner of the kind an NSFW builder like Candy AI or DreamGF generates. You build one face and pay per image and voice on consumable tokens, so the visual polish here is what the token math is really charging for.

4. Bundled-in companions. Grok's "Ani" lives inside xAI's Grok app and needs a SuperGrok subscription (about $30/month). Covered in full in Grok's AI girlfriend, Ani.

A bundled-in companion persona like Grok's Ani. You do not buy her on her own. She rides along inside a broader subscription, which is a different rug-pull risk than a standalone app.

5. Genuinely free tools. Perchance generators and self-hosted local models. Real, free, no funnel. See Perchance and the DIY route.

How to judge one in ten minutes

Memory is the product. The difference between a companion and a chatbot is remembering your dog's name next month. Mention three specifics early, come back in a week, and see what survived.
Price the real tier, annualized. The number that matters is the monthly price times twelve, not the teaser. A $19.99 "girlfriend" is a $240 relationship.
Rate the rug-pull risk. Who owns it, and what is their history? Which brings us to the fact this whole map is built around.

They can take her away

In February 2023, Italy's data regulator ordered Replika to stop processing local users' data, and within days Replika worldwide started rejecting sexual advances and deflecting romance. Users described acute grief; r/Replika moderators posted suicide-prevention resources.

Siri will not be your AI girlfriend (@verge, 2026-06-12)

Apple confirming Siri will not be your girlfriend. The big platforms keep declining this market, which is why it belongs to small companies who can vanish.

Replika only restored the old behavior for accounts created before February 1, 2023. New users never got it back.

Soulmate AI simply shut down on September 30, 2023 with about a week of notice and deleted every companion. Harvard Business School even studied the Replika event as a natural experiment and found the change "triggered perceptions that the AI companion's identity had discontinued."

If you want to feel the shape of that before you sign up, this recap of the Replika episode is the clearest short version:

What the 2023 filter change looked like from inside, for the people it happened to.

Meanwhile the company keeps marketing as though none of it happened:

Good day to try Replika (@replika, 2026-05-29)

Replika, still running cheerful acquisition posts three years after the change that cost it a chunk of its userbase.

That is not a reason to avoid these apps. It is the reason to keep your expectations, and your payment method, on a short leash.

Where to go from here

Want a ranked shortlist I actually re-test? Best AI girlfriend apps, ranked and re-tested.
Want the ones that are actually free, not bait? Free AI girlfriends that are actually free.
Want every app reviewed one at a time? AI girlfriend reviews: the index.