Six Things to Check Before You Pay for Any AI Companion Service

There are a lot of these services now, and the landing pages have converged on the same three screenshots and the same promise. Comparing them on vibes is hopeless. Comparing them on six specific questions takes about five minutes each and tells you almost everything.

Here is the list we would use. We answer each one for ourselves as we go, including the two where the answer is bad for us, because a checklist that its author conveniently passes is not a checklist.

1. Does it auto-renew, and what happens to unused time?

This is the question that decides what you actually pay over a year, and it is almost always written down - look for a page called cancellation policy or refund policy rather than the pricing page. Read for two specific things: whether the subscription renews unless you act, and whether there is any credit for a month you did not use.

The honest thing to know is that "no refunds for unused time" is extremely common and is not by itself a red flag. It is simply the shape of the deal, and you should know which shape you are buying.

Us: our chat tiers are monthly subscriptions and they renew like anyone else's. The generation side is different - Images and Video run on coins you buy once, and a coin you have not spent is not consumed by a billing cycle. Both shapes exist here, so pick the one that matches how you actually use it.

2. What happens to your content if you stop paying?

The interesting version of this question is not "is it deleted" but "does anyone promise it is not". Plenty of services say content is retained today while explicitly declining to guarantee it. That is more honest than silence, and it is also your cue to export anything you would miss.

Us: generated images and video have a retention window rather than living forever, and the length of it is on the product facts page with every other number we charge against. If a picture matters to you, download it. We are a studio, not an archive, and we would rather say so than let you find out later.

3. Can you see and correct what it remembers about you?

Memory is the feature that makes these products feel like anything at all, and it is also where they quietly accumulate wrong facts about you. The question is not whether a service has memory. It is whether you can open the list, read it, and delete a line.

A service that remembers but will not show you the record is asking for a lot of trust for no reason. Ours is inspectable and editable in Settings, and how companion memory works walks through what gets stored and what fades. The reason it matters in practice is in when your companion breaks character: a wrong memory is the most common cause of a character going strange, and deleting it is a thirty-second fix only if the interface lets you.

4. What are the content rules, and are they stated or discovered?

Every one of these products has limits. The difference that matters to you is whether they are written down somewhere you can read before paying, or whether you find them by hitting one mid-conversation.

Look for the specifics rather than the reassurance. Which categories are adult and which are not, what happens when a conversation crosses a line, and whether the rules differ by tier. A service that describes its limits in one vague sentence is telling you it would rather you did not know until you had paid.

Us: the split runs by companion. Curated adult companions engage with explicit text; companions outside that category redirect rather than refuse. Sexual content involving minors, age-play and non-consent are refused everywhere, on every tier, with no exceptions and no setting that changes it.

5. What does a failure cost you?

This one only applies where you are paying per unit rather than per month, but where it applies it is worth real money. If a generation fails, does the charge come back? Is that a published rule or a support conversation?

Us: a failed generation returns its coins automatically, as a code path rather than a decision someone makes about your ticket. We wrote out the reasoning in what a failed generation costs you, and the real failure rates and wait times we measured are in how long a generation actually takes. Ask any service for those two numbers and watch what happens.

6. What does it genuinely not do?

The last question is the one no landing page answers, so you have to infer it: what is absent. Check for a mobile app, for voice, for export, for an API, for whatever you personally assume is table stakes. Assumptions are where disappointment comes from.

Us, plainly: we have no mobile app. We are a web app that works well on a phone, which is not the same thing as an installed app with native notifications. We have no voice messages and no voice calls, in any form, today. If either of those is the point for you, we are the wrong choice and you should believe us the first time rather than paying to confirm it.

What we do have on the other side of the ledger is generation as a first-class half of the product rather than a bolt-on: an image studio and a video studio with their own quality tiers, aspect ratios and reference images, sitting next to the companions rather than bolted onto them.

Why we published a checklist we do not ace

Because the alternative is a comparison table where we win every row, and nobody has ever believed one of those. Two of the six answers above are straightforwardly bad for us, and they are the two most likely to matter to someone who wants a companion on their phone with a voice.

Run these six at whichever services you are weighing, ours included. If one of them cannot answer a question from its own public pages, that is an answer too.