Tokens or unlimited subscription: which AI companion plan really costs less?

Two apps at $13 a month can bill you three times apart by the end of it. The gap never shows on the pricing page. It hides one level down, in the billing model: tokens or unlimited.

Here is how to tell which one you are buying, what each action really costs, and how to work out your own number before the card comes out.

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Tokens or unlimited: the two models, one sentence each

Unlimited subscription. Flat price, no meter. Ten messages or five hundred, same bill at the end of the month.

Token model. Every action carries a price: an image, a video, a minute of voice call, sometimes the message itself. It draws from a balance that refills monthly, or that you top up separately when it runs dry.

Almost nothing in this category is purely one or the other. The dominant shape is hybrid: unlimited text, metered media. That is the setup that catches people out, because the advertised price only ever describes the unlimited half.

What one action actually costs

On a metered app, the subscription price is the least useful number on the page. The number that decides your bill is the unit cost of the thing you do most.

Promptchan publishes its rates, which is more than most manage. An image runs around 2 Gems, a video around 18, a voice message 1, a voice call 2. The $14.99 Plus plan includes 100 Gems a month. Do the division: roughly fifty simple images, or five videos. Full video, custom characters and voice calls are locked to the $33.99 Pro plan, and only Pro’s Casual generations are genuinely unlimited.

FantasyGF runs the harshest arithmetic we have documented. The monthly allowance is 100 tokens. A voice message costs 1, an image 7, a new companion 15, and a voice call 30 tokens per minute. Your whole month buys 14 images, or three minutes of calling. Voice calling is the headline feature, and the subscription covers three minutes of it. Top-ups start at $9.97 per 100 tokens. That is where the business model actually sits. We do not recommend paying FantasyGF at all: the creators’ Discord link on its own site is broken and the contact email bounces.

JOI AI charges 2,000 Neurons for five minutes of live video call, on a $17.77 monthly plan. The free tier tops out around 210 Neurons, so it does not cover a single call. Worse, one independent review found the session gets billed in full even if you hang up early, on a feature the product itself still labels beta.

Candy.ai is the clean example of the hybrid. Text is unlimited inside the subscription. The moment media enters, tokens take over: images, Live Action clips (5 to 10 tokens for up to 120 seconds), and Shorts past the free first episode. A large share of user complaints lands exactly there, on people who did not see the rule change mid-conversation.

OurDream AI adds a variable nobody advertises: roughly a 40% video generation failure rate. A failed render still spends your tokens. Your real cost per usable video is close to double the sticker rate.

The tier tables, side by side

App	Cheapest paid entry	What that buys outright	What stays metered
Nomi	$8.33/mo on annual ($99.99/yr)	Unlimited messages, unlimited voice calls, 10 companions, full memory, unfiltered adult	Nothing: every paid tier unlocks the same set
SpicyChat	$4.95/mo (Get a Taste)	No daily message cap, no ads, no queue	Images (unlock at $13.95), context size
OurDream AI	$9.99/mo on annual	Unlimited text, on free and paid alike	Images and video, from 1,000 tokens a month
Candy.ai	$3.99/mo on annual ($47.88/yr)	Unlimited text	Images, Live Action, Shorts past episode one
Nastia AI	$7.33/mo on annual (Premium)	Unlimited messages, voice, image and video generation	Group chats and the strongest traits sit on Unlimited
Infatuated.AI	$6.99/mo on annual	175 tokens a month	Everything: 1/message, 3/image, 5/voice call, 10/video
Promptchan	$14.99/mo (Plus)	100 Gems a month	Everything: ~2 Gems an image, ~18 a video
Secrets AI	≈$13.33/mo on annual	8,000 Moments a month, plus a 10% bonus	Every generation past that allowance
Kupid AI	$179/yr (≈$3.44/week)	25 photos, 8 videos, 12 voice minutes a week	Anything past the weekly quota, paid in coins

Read that table sideways rather than down. The cheap entry prices cluster on the metered apps. The flat ones charge more up front and stop asking afterwards.

Where an unlimited subscription genuinely delivers

SpicyChat is the cleanest offer on this exact point: text messages never run on a token or credit meter, on any tier, ever. Paying does not buy you the right to type. What it buys is the removal of friction. The free tier caps at roughly 100 messages a day (down from 150 in late 2025), and that count includes the character’s replies, so budget around 50 real exchanges. Get a Taste at $4.95 removes the cap, the ads and the peak-hour queue.

Nomi does something rarer still: every paid tier unlocks the identical feature set. Unlimited messaging, unlimited voice calls, up to 10 companions, group chats, the full memory system, unfiltered adult content. Nothing is held back for a higher price, which means the annual plan at $99.99 is a pure discount rather than an upsell.

OurDream AI keeps text unlimited and free of tokens even on paid plans. Only images and video touch the counter. Heavy multimedia use drains the 1,000 Premium tokens in about two weeks, and the rest of the month is still perfectly usable as a chat.

CrushOn AI skips currency entirely and tiers on message volume: 50 a day free with ads, 200 a day at $5.99, 6,000 a month at $14.99, unlimited at $49.90. You may not like the ceiling, but you can count it.

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Three billing tricks worth spotting on sight

The weekly rate dressed up as a small number. Kupid AI has no monthly plan. Billing runs weekly: $12.99 for Pro, $24.99 for Ultra. Next to a $12.99 monthly subscription it reads harmless. Over a year it is roughly $675. The same Pro plan costs $179 on annual billing, about $3.44 a week. Identical product, nearly four times the price, decided entirely by which button you click on signup.

The countdown that never actually expires. Nemora runs a permanent “up to 80% off” banner with a timer. Reload the page and the counter restarts around the 15-minute mark, every time, never tied to a real deadline. The odd part is that the discount underneath is genuine: the annual plan really is $47.88 for the year, $3.99 a month, which works out to 80.04% off the list price. The theatre is the countdown, not the number. No timer in this category should ever compress your decision.

The balance that starts at zero. JuicyChat AI lets you walk through its whole image generator as a free user. The catch is on the counter: the balance opens at 0 and a single generation costs 30. Nothing renders until you top up. The interface is free to admire. The pictures are not.

The three-step method for your real price

1. Find what is genuinely unlimited. Usually the text, and only the text. Check whether images, voice and video are included or drawn from a separate balance.
2. Find the unit cost of the action you will repeat most. An image, a minute of calling, a clip. It is almost always printed in small type, a long way from the headline price.
3. Multiply by a realistic week, not an optimistic month. Ten minutes of video call a day on JOI AI blows past any monthly subscription in the category, several times over.

If step 2 takes you more than two minutes to find, that is your answer already. An app that hides its unit cost is betting you will not do the multiplication.

How to test the whole thing for free

Nearly every metered app runs a free tier precisely because it converts. Use it against them.

• OurDream AI: 50 messages a day and 55 tokens, no card. Enough to see your own niche rendered before you decide.
• Promptchan: a daily Gem allowance, no card. Generate one image and watch what the counter does.
• Nastia AI: a companion and a daily quota, no card. The operator’s FAQ says the explicit register is open on free; in practice it looked paid to us. Ten minutes settles it for your account.
• Kupid AI: 15 messages total on one character, no photos, no voice. Enough to judge the voice, nothing else.

The apps with no meaningful free tier are worth naming too: Kindroid charges from $13.99 with no free plan at all, so you pay a month just to evaluate it, and its MAX tier runs $59.99. More detail on where each paywall sits is in our free versus paid breakdown.

The questions people actually type

Is “unlimited” ever really unlimited? On text, sometimes yes. SpicyChat, Nomi, OurDream AI and Candy.ai all deliver genuinely unmetered conversation on a paid plan. On media, essentially never. Promptchan’s Pro tier is the closest thing, and even there the unlimited part applies only to Casual-quality generations.

Which app has no counter anywhere? Nomi, on any paid tier, is the strongest answer: unlimited messages and unlimited voice calls, nothing held back for a higher price. Kindroid bundles selfies, voice calls and short video into one subscription with no separate currency, but it makes you pay before you can look.

Is annual billing worth it? It saves 17% on SpicyChat and roughly half on Candy.ai, Nemora and OurDream AI. Only if you are still opening the app in month four, and most people are not. Take one month first.

Watch the counter for the second reason too. A token balance is the only honest usage log in this category: it does not tell you what you spent so much as how many evenings you spent. Glance at it occasionally. Not for the money.

Bottom line

An unlimited subscription protects you from doing arithmetic. A token model moves the real price onto your behaviour. Neither is dishonest by design, and the metered apps often make the better images. The mistake is picking without the multiplication.

So do it once, then go spend twenty minutes on a free tier before anything is charged. If you are shopping mainly for renders, our guide to image and video generation prices the same apps from the other direction.