You cancelled. The next month, you were charged anyway. This is the single most common complaint about AI companion subscriptions, and in most cases it isn’t a scam — it’s a structural trap. You cancelled in the wrong place.

Here’s what actually happens, why it happens, and what to check before you assume you’ve been robbed. We’ve written this to be useful whichever platform you’re on, because the mechanism is nearly always the same.

The one thing that causes most failed cancellations

You cancel where you signed up — not where you use the app. That sentence is the whole article. Everything else is detail.

AI companion platforms sell subscriptions through three different channels, and each one has its own cancellation path that the others cannot touch:

• Direct on the platform’s website, usually billed through a payment processor like Stripe or a specialised adult-payment provider. You cancel in your account settings on that site.
• Through the Apple App Store, if you installed the iOS app and paid inside it. Apple holds the subscription. The platform’s own settings page often shows nothing useful, and its support team frequently cannot cancel it for you.
• Through Google Play, same logic on Android.

So a person who installed the mobile app, subscribed inside it, then later opened the website and clicked “cancel” in their profile will see a confirmation — and keep being charged. The website cancelled something; it just wasn’t the thing taking the money.

Cancelling is not deleting

These are two separate actions, and almost every platform treats them separately.

Cancelling stops future payments. Your account usually stays open until the end of the period you’ve already paid for, and your conversations, characters and generated images remain on the platform’s servers afterwards.

Deleting your account is what removes the data. It is often not a button at all — several platforms require an email from your registered address, and state a processing window of up to thirty days.

If your reason for leaving is privacy rather than money, cancelling alone achieves nothing. Do both, in that order, and keep the confirmation of each — and see what actually happens to your conversations before you decide how urgent deletion is.

The step-by-step, by channel

If you subscribed on the website

1. Log in on a desktop browser rather than the mobile app — the account area is often truncated on mobile.
2. Find Account, Settings or Billing. Look for Manage subscription.
3. Many platforms hand off to their payment processor at this point. That’s normal — the cancel button lives in that portal, not on the platform.
4. Confirm, then screenshot the confirmation screen and save the confirmation email. If you’re charged again, this is your evidence.

If you subscribed on iPhone or iPad

1. Settings → tap your name at the top → Subscriptions.
2. Select the app, then Cancel Subscription.
3. If the app isn’t listed, you didn’t subscribe through Apple — go back to the website path above.

If you subscribed on Android

1. Google Play Store → your profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions.
2. Select the app, then Cancel subscription.

Timing: cancel before the renewal, not on it

Cancellations are processed against the renewal date, and processing isn’t instant across every channel. Doing it at least a full day before your renewal avoids the case where the charge fires while the cancellation is still propagating.

Cancelling early almost never costs you anything: on the large majority of platforms you keep access until the end of the period you’ve already paid for. Waiting until the last hour is what costs people a month.

You were charged anyway. Now what?

There is no general legal right to a prorated refund when you cancel mid-cycle. Whether you get money back depends on the platform’s own terms and on which channel you bought through. That said, the practical order matters:

1. Identify the real biller first — the merchant name on the statement. Complaining to the wrong party wastes the days that matter.
2. Ask quickly. Refund requests made within days of the charge are treated very differently from requests made weeks later, on every channel.
3. Be specific. Date of cancellation, date of charge, and the screenshot you took. A request with evidence is a different conversation from a request without.
4. Card chargeback is a last resort, not a first move. It can get your account closed and your data deleted before you’ve retrieved anything you wanted to keep.

Before you subscribe: three things worth two minutes

Most of the pain above is avoidable at signup rather than at exit.

• Note where you’re paying. Website or app store — write it down. It determines everything later. It also affects what you’ll actually spend: the subscription is rarely the full cost.
• Check whether deletion is self-service. If the only route is an email request, you’ll want to know that before you’ve uploaded anything personal.
• Look at the billing descriptor if the platform states it. Some publish what appears on your statement; many don’t. It’s a reasonable thing to want to know in advance.

How Sexya treats this

Most comparison sites give cancellation one line in a table, if that. We treat it as a scored part of the experience, because the way a platform lets you leave tells you how it treats you while you stay.

Our protocol has a dedicated stage for it: a real paid account, followed through the entire cancellation path to confirmation, plus the account deletion route and the billing descriptor where we can observe it on an actual charge. It sits outside our hundred-point score deliberately — so no platform earns credit for doing the legal minimum.

Read the full protocol or see which companions are currently under evaluation.