AI Dating Hubtests AI dating and companion apps on paid accounts, for readers in the US

It depends on whether you want a companion to talk to or a matchmaking product — the two are marketed identically and are not the same thing. For an AI companion, Candy.ai holds a character together longest and has a usable free tier. We say plainly in each write-up which of the two categories an app belongs to.

Free tiers are real but almost always metered — a daily message allowance, a handful of images, or voice locked behind the paid plan. What differs is how usable the free tier is before the meter runs out, and that is the figure we report for every app rather than repeating the word 'free' from the landing page.

Usually more than the headline figure, which is typically promotional, annual-divided-by-twelve, or a tier that excludes the feature you came for. Every review reports what we were actually charged at renewal, and whether cancelling was straightforward — that second part is where several otherwise good apps lose their recommendation.

All of them claim to; the difference is how far back and how reliably. Memory is the single feature that separates a companion you keep from one you abandon after a fortnight, so we test it deliberately — details given in week one, checked again in week four — and report what actually survived.

It varies more than most users expect, and it matters more here than in most software. Some platforms encrypt conversations and honour deletion requests; others retain logs indefinitely and reserve the right to use them for training. We read the privacy policy of every app reviewed here and report retention, training use, third-party sharing and deletion.