Companaya

Most AI companion platforms advertise $9.99 or $12.99 per month. The real monthly cost for an active user is 2-5x that once token systems kick in. One major platform I tested after tracking every transaction for 30 days advertises $12.99 — regular users end up spending $25-60 monthly once image generation and voice tokens are factored in. The subscription price is the floor not the ceiling on most platforms. The ones with genuinely flat pricing where what you see is what you pay are rare. Full breakdown: medium.com/@companaya/i-spent-500-testing-ai-companion-apps-real-monthly-costs-revealed-2026-8a6c0532778d

Memory is the most marketed and least delivered feature in the AI companion space. Most platforms claim to remember you but either reset between sessions or just pull from a profile you filled in manually. After two years of testing the ones that actually carry real conversational context across weeks are rare. Just published a full breakdown of which platforms actually deliver on this versus which ones are just marketing: medium.com/@companaya/nomi-ai-review-2026-is-it-worth-it-tested-c91811dcb24a

Been testing AI companion apps seriously for the past few months — memory quality, pricing honesty, voice features, content freedom. Most of what gets recommended online is either outdated or paid placements dressed up as reviews. A few things I've found that actually matter before picking an app: Memory is the most lied-about feature. Tell the AI something personal, come back 3 days later, see if it remembers. 80% of apps fail this completely. The "free tier" on most platforms is 10-15 messages then a hard stop. Only two apps I've tested have genuinely unlimited free chat Selira AI and SpicyChat. Token systems on top of monthly subscriptions are everywhere. The advertised price and the real monthly cost are often very different numbers. I put together a full honest review of Soulkyn AI this week one of the more interesting platforms because it runs a 70B model and owns its own GPU infrastructure. No API restrictions inherited from OpenAI. Full breakdown here: https://medium.com/@companaya/soulkyn-ai-review-2026-is-it-worth-it-tested-2631ca3164f1 Happy to answer questions about any platform tested about 40 of them at this point.