Published monthly prices among the apps we track:
| App | Published monthly price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| Sweetdream | $10.00 | Yes |
| Candy AI | $12.99 | Yes |
| Nomi | $15.99 | Yes |
| Replika | $19.99 | Yes |
Those are the numbers on the pricing pages. Four things routinely sit on top of them.
1. Intro pricing that is not the price
The number you see at checkout is frequently a first-period discount. The renewal is at list. Nothing illegal happens here and nothing is hidden — it is simply that the moment you compare apps is the moment you are shown the lowest number each of them will ever charge you.
The practical defence is to compare renewal prices only, and to put the renewal date in a calendar on the day you subscribe.
2. Credits on top of the subscription
This is the largest gap between expectation and bill. In several apps the subscription buys conversation, and images or voice are metered separately. A $12 plan with a heavy image habit can land well above a $20 plan that includes media.
The thing to check before paying is not whether an app has image generation — they all do — but whether generating images is included in the plan or billed against a balance. Candy AI including chat, images and voice inside one subscription is precisely why it tops our ranking, rather than any single feature being best in class.
3. The feature you want being one tier up
Voice calls, longer memory, faster replies and video are common tier gates. The advertised price is the entry tier, and the feature that made you interested is often not in it.
Read the tier table, find the specific line item you came for, and price that tier. If the app does not publish a tier table at all, treat the advertised figure as a floor rather than a price.
4. Annual plans that are cheaper and worse
Annual billing typically saves 30–50% against monthly. It also commits you to a category where the thing you are buying can change under you: models get swapped, filters get retuned, and the character you liked in March may not be the one you have in September.
Monthly first, annual only after a month you actually enjoyed, is the sequence that loses least. The trade-off is worked through in monthly, annual or credits.
What the cheapest option really is
Sweetdream at $10.00 is the lowest published price among the apps we test, and it also has the free tier we rate highest — which makes it the cheapest honest way into the category rather than merely the cheapest number.
The most expensive mistake is not picking the wrong app. It is paying for a year of one you have used for four days. Everything else here is rounding error by comparison, and the rest of the arithmetic is in the hidden costs guide.
