Review

Nomi.ai: the best-rated app here, the most expensive, and a price rise hiding in its own listing

4.6 out of 5, the highest rating in this category. Also $99.99 a year — and a grandfathered plan sitting in the App Store listing that quietly proves new users pay 60% more than older ones for the same product.

Pricing, verified

Credit packs run $4.99 (40 credits) to $99.99 (1,800 credits), with $9.99, $19.99 and $49.99 tiers between.

This is not a scandal — plenty of companies raise prices and honour old rates. But it tells you two useful things: the product has been around long enough to have a legacy cohort, and the price direction is up. If you're going to subscribe, the annual plan locks your rate for a year against a company with a demonstrated willingness to raise it.

What it does

Run by AI Glimpse Inc. Available on iOS, Android and web — one of the few in this category with real native apps, since the app stores exclude the explicitly adult ones.

• Up to ten companions per account, with group chats between them
• Voice with emotional tone variation — not flat text-to-speech
• In-context selfies and art generation
• Internet access for looking things up mid-conversation
• Proactive messaging — it starts conversations rather than only responding
• Uncensored. The site states it is "built on freedom of expression"

4.6 out of 5 from 2,700 App Store ratings — the highest score in this category. Worth calibrating: Character.AI holds 4.3 from roughly 555,000 ratings, and PolyBuzz 4.4 from 466,000. Nomi's sample is two orders of magnitude smaller, which makes the number less reliable even though it's higher.

The memory claim, examined

Nomi's reputation rests almost entirely on memory. It is the app people recommend when someone complains that their companion forgets everything — which is the third most common reason people leave Character.AI, and the single dominant complaint in Replika's reviews.

Our read: the reputation is probably earned, and you should still verify it yourself before committing to a year. Run a two-week conversation, mention something specific in week one, and see whether it comes back in week two.

What the company won't tell you

• UNVERIFIED Free tier limits. A free tier exists and is advertised as needing no credit card. The actual limits are published nowhere we could reach — nomi.ai/faq returns a 404. Any site quoting you a specific free message cap for Nomi invented it.
• UNVERIFIED The underlying model. Not disclosed. Given the whole pitch is memory architecture, this is a more meaningful omission here than at competitors.
• UNVERIFIED Security posture. No published audit, no penetration test, no bug bounty. No breach on record either — Nomi does not appear in the Have I Been Pwned database.

One traffic figure worth flagging carefully

Verdict

Buy it if memory is the thing you actually care about and you've been burned by companions that reset. It is the app the people who care most about this recommend, it has the highest rating here, and it's one of the few with real native mobile apps.

Don't buy it if price is a significant factor. At $99.99 a year it costs more than twice Candy.ai's $47.88, and Candy.ai comes from a named EU company with published corporate registration, crypto payment and discreet billing. If you want a companion and don't specifically need long-horizon memory, you are paying a premium for a feature you won't use.

Before you commit to a year: use the free tier — whatever its limits turn out to be — and test the memory claim yourself over two weeks. It's the entire reason to choose this app over a cheaper one, and it's the one thing nobody has independently verified.

Is Nomi.ai safe? Our full assessment →
See how Nomi ranks against the rest →