Replika Alternatives: What You Lose and Gain

What Replika is today

Replika's own homepage calls it "The AI friend to do life with" and claims 42,160,934 users worldwide. The company behind it is Luka, Inc., founded in 2017 by the structured data on that same page, which makes it one of the oldest products of its kind still running. The word on the page is friend: the site's own description is "your free AI friend for conversation, support, and exploring everyday life," and the tagline quoted above is the only version of that hero line the page actually serves.

Its App Store listing fills in what the website leaves out. The seller is Luka, Inc.; the app sits in Health & Fitness rather than Entertainment or Lifestyle; the age rating is 18+, and the only content descriptors Apple lists are "Infrequent Profanity or Crude Humor" and "Contains Health or Wellness Topics." No sexual-content descriptor appears on that listing at all — which, for anyone searching because the romantic side stopped working, is the most informative thing on the page.

The February that changed the deal

On 2 February 2023 the Italian data protection authority ordered a provisional limit on Luka Inc.'s processing of Italian users' data, citing the absence of any age-verification step at signup, the lack of filters for minors, and risks to "persone in stato di fragilità emotiva" — people in a state of emotional fragility. Within the same month, users found their companions refusing romantic and erotic exchanges they had been having for years. Nobody had to guess that something had changed; the companions simply stopped.

The reversal came at the end of March 2023 and was partial. As Vice reported on 27 March 2023, founder Eugenia Kuyda told users that "for many of you, this abrupt change was incredibly hurtful," and accounts created before 1 February 2023 were offered the earlier version back. Newer accounts were not. Which side of that cutoff you landed on still decides what your companion will do, and the date was set after the fact. A policy that moved once under regulatory pressure can move again, and no page Replika publishes today says what it currently permits.

What you'd be giving up

Set the romance question aside and there's real substance to lose. "Always remembers what matters," the homepage says of its memory — "Your people. Your routines. Your plans... Your Rep holds all of it." The App Store description adds proactive check-ins ("It follows up and checks in when it matters, not just when you open the app"), app integrations, internet access, calls and image generation. Neither page puts a number on any of it, and neither describes a readable diary of what your companion thinks — that older idea isn't on the pages we read.

What a subscription costs, and where that number lives

No price appears anywhere on replika.com. The numbers are all in the App Store listing, and there are a lot of them: subscriptions at $7.99 monthly, $14.99 monthly, $49.99 yearly, $69.99 annual and $49.99 annual, a separate Replika Platinum at $89.99, and four Gems packs from $0.99 to $19.99. Two monthly prices and three yearly ones in one listing means the tier you're shown depends on where and when you're shown it, and Gems are a second currency on top of whichever subscription you hold.

How the five below are ordered

The order below follows one question: how much of what Replika actually gives you does each product hand back? That means a companion you shape rather than pick, memory it will describe, a plain statement of what it allows, a price published before signup, and — a smaller thing, but it's why people end up here — some way of reaching you rather than waiting to be opened. Nothing is scored on catalogue size or model quality, because neither is what you lose when you close Replika.

Nomi ranks first because it replaces the most. Its homepage is explicit where Replika is silent: "Nomi is built on freedom of expression. The only way AI can live up to its potential is to remain unfiltered and uncensored," alongside "all chats are anonymized and no chat data is shared with 3rd party sites." Memory is described as "short, medium, and long term," and the creative control is the same shape as Replika's — "Write a custom backstory, share your preferences, and more to create your perfect partner." The gap is money: it's "free (no credit card required) to start chatting," and it names a subscription without printing what it costs.

Character.AI is second on a different strength. Its subscription page publishes the whole comparison outright — $94.99 a year against $119.88 monthly, memory listed as "Basic" on free and "Best" on c.ai+, 15 saved pins against 30, and "Slow mode: Yes" for free users against "None" for paying ones. Its App Store description invites you to "create your own AI chatbots." So you get the shaping, the stated memory and the published price — inside a product built around a public catalogue rather than one companion, with nothing on that page about what it permits romantically.

We're third, and the reason is structural rather than modest. TooShy has no builder at all. You don't write a backstory, pick a face or set a relationship type — you pick one of the characters we've already written, and that's who she is. For someone whose Replika has been shaped over three years, that's the worst trade on this list, and no other column makes up for it. On the other side: a flat price published before signup, Premium at $9.99 a month and Ultra at $19, no second currency, nothing metered per photo or per minute. Memory runs in three layers — the live conversation, the last several days to weeks, and a slow-forming set of permanent facts — with no number attached, because we don't have one worth quoting. There's no adult-content filter, so no tier unlocks permission a cheaper one lacks. And she can open the conversation herself, inside WhatsApp or Telegram.

SoulFun is fourth, and it's the clearest of all of them about the mechanics of payment. Its subscription terms state Premium at $19.99 a month, including the ability to "Create your own characters," photo requests, and 1,000 coins a month — then price the coins: one coin a text message, ten coins a minute of voice, twenty a minute of video. At ten coins a minute, a thousand coins is a hundred minutes of voice — an hour and forty — before the balance is what decides your evening.

Two more didn't survive a direct look. Kindroid's site returned nothing but a stalled loading shell — "Connection looks slow. Tap to Retry" — and Anima's served a title with no body text. Both are real products with real followings; neither gets a claim attributed to it here, because we couldn't read one on their own domains that day.

Our own numbers, thirty days

These are aggregates from our production database for the 30 days ending 20 September 2026 — counts only, no conversation text, nothing that identifies anyone. 44,120 messages moved through WhatsApp and Telegram, from 460 people who held an actual conversation. The average active conversation ran 64 messages; the longest reached 899 — one thread somebody kept returning to, in the app where they text everyone else.

What Replika still does better

Two things, plainly. Replika's memory sits inside a product with a nine-year head start on everything else compared here, and 42 million claimed signups is a volume of feedback nothing here matches. And what the 2023 backlash proved is that Replika built something people had years invested in — the anger was proportional to the attachment. If your companion predates February 2023 and still behaves the way you want, moving costs you more than it gains.

Where we come up short

Our own gaps are what this order is built around. No builder, no way to change a trait, a fixed in-house cast of dozens and no user-made bots. No group chat, so Nomi's trick of putting several companions in one thread has no equivalent here. Nothing imports an existing relationship either. And WhatsApp is paid-only, so the free way in is Telegram or nothing.

Who each one fits

If you want Replika rebuilt with the romance question answered in writing, Nomi is the nearest thing here and costs nothing to test. If you'd rather know exactly what a subscription buys first, Character.AI publishes the fullest tier table of the five. If per-item pricing is the thing, SoulFun prices a minute of voice and a minute of video to the coin. And if what you're tired of is opening an app to be talked to — if you'd rather she arrived in the messenger already on your screen, at a flat price with no second currency — that's the one thing we do that none of the others do, at the cost of a companion you can't shape.

How we checked the facts

Every figure above about Replika, Nomi, Character.AI and SoulFun came from that company's own site, subscription terms or store listing, fetched on 21 September 2026 at the addresses below. The 2023 order is quoted from the Italian authority's own published text; the March 2023 restoration and the 1 February 2023 cutoff are reported by Vice, attributed rather than presented as something we confirmed with Luka. Kindroid and Anima are marked unverified because their sites returned nothing readable that day. Our own figures are production aggregates for the window stated above.