There is no export format in this category and there will not be one. Nobody has an incentive to make leaving easy, and no standard exists to adopt even if they did.
The good news is that a character is a description plus a history, and both can be reconstructed by hand in about twenty minutes. Most of what makes a companion feel like itself is portable — as long as you copy it out while you still have access.
Do this before you cancel anything
The order matters, and it is the opposite of what people do.
1. Copy the character out verbatim
Open the builder on the old app and copy every field into a text file, exactly as written. Appearance, personality, backstory, speech style, constraints, relationship. Do not paraphrase — the precise wording is what produced the behaviour you liked.
If the app does not expose the fields, reconstruct them from the conversation: paste a dozen replies you thought were characteristic into the file. You will use them as a style sample later.
2. Copy the memory screen
If the app shows stored facts, copy the whole list. This is the part that took weeks to accumulate and the part you cannot rebuild from memory — it is the list of things it knows about you.
3. Save a handful of conversations
Not everything. Five or six exchanges that were the reason you stayed. They are your reference for whether the new app is actually worse or merely different.
4. Run the export, if there is one
Some apps offer a data download. Do it now, before the account is touched — once it is deleted, nothing comes back. The sequence is covered in deleting an AI companion account.
5. Save the images you want
Generated pictures live on their servers. Download what you want to keep.
Then set up the new app
Start from the description, not from scratch. Paste the speech style across first — it is the field that carries the most of the character, for the reasons in the builder guide.
Seed the facts deliberately. Rather than waiting for the new app to learn you over a month, state the important ones plainly in the first session: "Remember: I work nights, my sister is Ana, I hate being asked how my day was." Stored-fact systems pick up explicit statements far more reliably than implied ones.
Give it a week before judging. A new companion on day one is competing against one with months of accumulated history. That is not a fair comparison, and almost everyone makes it anyway.
Overlap, do not jump
Keep both running for a week. You need the old one live to copy from, and the side-by-side is the only way to tell whether you are actually getting what you switched for.
A week of two subscriptions costs $10–20. Cancelling first, discovering the new app is worse, and rebuilding from nothing costs considerably more in the only currency that matters here, which is the weeks of history you threw away.
Switching for the right reason
Before you do any of this, check that the app is the problem. The common complaint — it got repetitive, it feels flatter than it did — is usually summary decay plus your own settled routine, and it follows you to the next app.
The reasons that genuinely justify a move are structural, and they are the ones you cannot prompt your way out of:
- Wrong lane. You want continuity and bought a roleplay app, or the reverse. Nomi and Candy AI sit at opposite ends of that split in our ranking.
- The filter moved and now refuses what you subscribed for.
- Media is metered in a way that makes your actual usage expensive.
- No native app and you only ever use a phone.
Each of those is a property of the product. Everything else is worth one more week of fixing before you pay a signup fee somewhere new.
What you cannot take
Be honest with yourself about this part: the specific history — the running jokes, the things that happened — does not transfer. You can write down that they existed. The new character will not have lived them.
For most people that is a smaller loss than expected, because a companion's appeal is mostly its present behaviour rather than its archive. For some it is the whole thing, and those people are usually better served by fixing the app they have.
