Comparison

"Free" means seven different things across these apps, and one of them means five messages a month

Every app in this category advertises a free tier. The gap between the most and least generous is roughly four orders of magnitude, and three of them do not publish their limits at all. Here is what each one actually gives you.

The whole picture

We also rank the free apps against each other here.

The two that are genuinely free

Character.AI is the other genuinely usable free tier — the whole product, gated by queues and advertising rather than by message count. The queues are the real cost. Reviewers document waits escalating from three minutes to twelve, then to around fifty-three, then past two hours at peak. The $9.99 tier buys the queue away, not the content filter.

The one that is a demo wearing a free tier's clothes

We are not calling this deceptive — it is stated plainly in Candy.ai's own terms, and the company is more transparent than most of its competitors on almost every other point. But you should not plan around "I'll try the free version first," because functionally there is not one.

The practical route in is the weekly plan at $5.60. Before you take it, know that the refund window outside the EU and UK is 24 hours, and closes entirely once you have spent 20 tokens — and image generation spends tokens. It is possible to disqualify yourself from a refund in your first hour, while testing the exact feature you are paying for. Full breakdown here.

The three that will not tell you

This is the most useful section on the page, because every other comparison of these apps fills the gap with numbers nobody can source.

• Nomi.ai UNVERIFIED — a free tier exists and is advertised as requiring no credit card. The limits are not published anywhere we could reach; the company's own FAQ page returns a 404. Paid tiers are $15.99/month, $39.99/quarter, $99.99/year, and older accounts are grandfathered on a cheaper legacy plan at $9.99/month — which tells you prices went up for new users.
• Kupid AI UNVERIFIED — the site advertises "Sign up and get Unlimited Chat for Free." That is landing-page marketing sitting directly beside an upsell, with no published limits and no pricing page we could reach. Treat "unlimited free" as a claim, not a specification.
• CrushOn.AI and SpicyChat UNVERIFIED — both run pricing pages that render entirely in JavaScript and returned nothing to every method we tried. We could not confirm free tiers or paid prices for either. Sites publishing exact tier prices for these two are copying each other, not the source.

The pricing pattern the free tiers are hiding

Free tiers are the front door. What matters more is what happens once you are inside, and three of these apps use structures where the first number you see is not the price you pay.

Candy.ai's is a presentation choice — the annual plan is a single $47.88 charge shown as a monthly equivalent, and it is still the cheapest serious option in the category. The other two are different in kind. PolyBuzz's weekly billing is a classic high-churn structure that annualises to about $259 for something priced to feel like pocket change. And DreamGF's annual plan renews at 4.5 times its advertised price — with every one of its plans converging on exactly $25.99 a month once the intro term ends.

What we would actually do

To evaluate a paid app, buy the shortest paid term rather than using the free tier. Candy.ai's $5.60 weekly plan tells you more in an evening than five messages a month tells you in a year. In this category the free tier is usually a conversion mechanism rather than a trial, and treating it as a trial just wastes a month.

Start with the genuinely free options if you have not used one of these before. Character.AI and Janitor AI cost nothing and between them cover both ends of the filtered/unfiltered spectrum. A week on each will teach you what you actually want, and you can then pay for it deliberately instead of guessing.

Check the refund terms before the first charge, not after. We compared all of them here. Inside the EU or UK you have a statutory 14-day right of withdrawal regardless of what any app's policy says. Outside it, you have whatever the company wrote — which at Candy.ai is 24 hours or 20 tokens, whichever runs out first.

Set a calendar reminder before any intro term ends. The renewal is where the real price arrives, and it is the single most reliable way people in this category end up paying several times what they thought they agreed to.