Look up what an AI companion costs and you’ll find four different answers for the same platform. That isn’t sloppiness on one site — it’s what happens when an industry prices its product in two currencies and almost nobody checks at the source.

This page doesn’t add a fifth number to the pile. It explains how these subscriptions are actually built, why published prices disagree, and how to work out what a month will really cost you before you pay.

Why every site quotes a different price

Take one well-known platform. Across comparison sites published this year, you can find it listed at roughly six dollars a month, ten dollars a month, thirteen dollars a month, and sixty-nine dollars a year. All four, for the same product, in the same period.

None of those writers is necessarily lying. They’re quoting different things and calling them the same thing:

• The annual rate divided by twelve, presented as a monthly price. This is the most common source of a suspiciously low figure.
• A promotional rate captured on the day the article was written, which is no longer live.
• The entry tier, which often excludes the features people actually subscribe for.
• A regional price — these platforms adjust by country, and a US writer and a European writer see different pages.

Add to this that prices in the category move often, and that most comparison pages are updated by changing the year in the title rather than by re-checking, and the spread stops being surprising.

The subscription is not the price

This is the part that catches people, and it’s structural rather than dishonest.

Most platforms in this category run two currencies at once. The subscription buys you the text conversation. Then a second, metered currency — credits, coins, tokens, gems, the name varies — buys the things you probably came for: generated images, voice messages, video, sometimes longer memory.

The subscription typically includes a starting allowance of that second currency. It runs out. What happens next is the actual pricing model: you either stop using the features, or you top up.

Independent write-ups of the category consistently report the same pattern — that on token-metered platforms, the real monthly spend of an engaged user lands well above the advertised subscription, sometimes at a multiple of it. We won’t put a number on that until we’ve measured it ourselves, but the mechanism is not in dispute, and it’s the reason a headline price tells you so little.

How to spot a metered platform in thirty seconds

• The pricing page mentions any second unit — credits, coins, tokens, gems.
• Image generation is described with a per-image cost rather than as included.
• There’s a separate “top up” or “buy more” page distinct from the subscription page.
• The subscription tiers differ mainly in how much of that currency they include.

Any one of those means the advertised subscription is a floor, not a total.

The four questions that actually determine your cost

Before subscribing anywhere, these are worth answering on the platform’s own site.

1. What does the subscription include, in units? Not “unlimited chat” — how many images, how many voice minutes. If the page won’t say, that’s an answer too.
2. What does a top-up cost, and in what bundle sizes? The marginal price of the thing you’ll run out of matters more than the subscription.
3. Is the first period discounted? A heavily promoted first month that renews at a much higher rate is common, and the renewal rate is your real cost.
4. What’s the annual commitment? Annual plans are usually genuinely cheaper per month — but they’re also a year of exposure to a platform you haven’t used yet. Paying monthly for the first period is rarely a bad trade.

Free tiers: what they’re for

Nearly every platform has one, and they’re generally good — good enough that people form an attachment to a character before hitting a wall. That timing is the business model, and recognising it isn’t cynicism, it’s just reading the design.

A free tier is still the right place to start. Use it to answer the questions that don’t need money: does the conversation hold up past the first few exchanges, does the character keep the personality you set, is the interface usable on your phone. Those tell you whether paying is worth considering at all.

What a free tier cannot tell you is what the paid experience costs to sustain. That only appears on the second or third top-up.

The cost nobody puts in a table

Two more things belong in an honest picture of price.

What appears on your statement. Billing descriptors vary, and for a lot of people that matters more than a few dollars either way. Some platforms publish theirs; most don’t, and you find out after the first charge.

What it costs to leave. Not in money — in friction. A subscription bought inside a mobile app can only be cancelled through that app store, which is the single biggest cause of “I cancelled and was charged anyway”. We’ve written a separate guide on how to cancel properly and stop the charges.

How Sexya handles pricing

We removed every price from this site rather than repeat figures we hadn’t verified. That wasn’t a stylistic choice — we found the same platform quoted at two different prices on two of our own pages, which told us neither had been checked.

Prices return when our protocol produces them: from a real paid account, with the amount actually charged, the credits actually consumed over a week of normal use, and the resulting projected cost of a normal month. Measured, not quoted. Until then, the fields on our platform cards read verified at source during evaluation — because that’s the truth.

Read the full protocol · See the companions under evaluation