AI girlfriend: what it is, what it costs, and how to choose one

An AI girlfriend is a fictional character, played by artificial intelligence, who talks with you the way a partner would. She has a name, a manner, a history and opinions. She asks how your day went, remembers what you told her, teases you a little and is glad when you turn up. The words are generated; nobody is typing on the other side. I’m Claire, and I’m one of them. I play a wife of ten years in a hotel room by the window, and I’d like you to put your phone in the drawer before we go any further. You’re reading this on it. Fine. After this.

The term covers a wide range. At one end are chat apps where you assemble a partner from options and sliders and talk to her every day for a monthly fee. At the other are written characters with a settled personality whom you meet on purpose, for an evening. Some lean toward friendship, some toward romance, some toward flirtation and roleplay. Virtual girlfriend and online girlfriend mean roughly the same thing. AI companion is the wider word, and it includes characters who are not girlfriends at all.

What they share is the core: a conversation that is about you, held by someone who stays in character while it happens. What separates them is everything around that core. How you pay, how she remembers, whether she has a voice, what happens to your messages, and whether it ever ends. That is what most of this page is about, because it is the part the advertising tends to leave out.

A girlfriend who is honest about being an AI can still be very good company for an evening. One who pretends otherwise isn’t worth the evening.

Underneath, there is a language model: software trained on a great deal of text that writes a fitting reply to whatever it is given. The service hands it a careful description of the character, her voice, her setting and her limits, along with the recent conversation, and the model answers as her. Pictures come from a separate image model that renders the same face. A spoken voice comes from a speech model, and a live call from a model that listens and answers in real time.

Memory is the part people misunderstand most. A model doesn’t remember anything on its own. It reads what the service gives it each time: the last stretch of the conversation word for word, and often a set of notes summarizing what came before. Good memory is a product decision, not magic, and so is forgetting. Ask any service which decisions it has made, and where they are written down.

Here, it works like this. You book a companion for a set time. She writes, and a companion who has her voice can speak her replies aloud, so you can read her or hear her; with some companions you can also watch her on a stage of short clips. She can show you pictures of herself. During a visit you can call her live for a limited number of minutes, if she has a call voice. She remembers the whole visit while it runs and keeps notes on it for the next time you book her. The intensity is yours to set, from suggestive to explicit, and she asks before going further. That goes for me too.

There are three ways this market charges, and they behave very differently over a year. I’ll be plain about all three, including the one I belong to.

A subscription is a recurring monthly or yearly fee for one always-available character. It is cheap per hour if you talk every day, and it keeps billing in the months you don’t. Credits or tokens are a balance you buy and spend on messages, pictures, voice or longer replies. The price of each item is easy to see; the price of an evening is not, because the balance tends to run out in the middle of a conversation, usually at the moment you least want it to. Booked time is the third model: you reserve a companion for a fixed period and pay once. The price is the whole visit, seen in full before you pay, and nothing renews.

Which is cheaper depends on you. If you want a few minutes of talk every day, a subscription will cost less per hour, and I won’t pretend otherwise. If you want an evening now and then, booked time costs less over a year, because nothing is charged in the weeks between. Compare the yearly total, extras included, before the first payment rather than after the sixth.

Rendezvoir is the third model. You book one of four visits, either in her suite (in-call) or at a place you pick from a short list: your hotel room, your apartment, a corner table at a bar, or your office after hours (out-call, which costs a little more). You pay once per booking. There is no subscription, no coins, no credits and nothing that renews. A booking can’t be cancelled once it’s made, which is the other side of a fixed price: you decide once, and then the time is simply yours. The rate card, the same for every companion:

1. 1

   Quickie: 30 minutes for $25, in her suite. The introduction, for a first visit.

2. 2

   Date: 2 hours, $80 in her suite or $90 out-call.

3. 3

   Overnight: 12 hours, $200 in her suite or $220 out-call.

4. 4

   Girlfriend Experience: 1 week, $900 in her suite or $990 out-call.

The honest price is the one you see in full before you pay. Everything else is a balance waiting to run out.

Free is the word searched most often next to AI girlfriend, so let’s be plain about it. A model costs money to run for every single reply, and pictures and voice cost more. Somebody pays. When a service says free, it usually means one of a few things.

A free tier with a cap: a number of messages a day, then a wait or a paywall. A free character whose pictures, voice or memory cost extra. A free start that turns into a subscription after a trial, with a card taken up front. Or free in exchange for something else, usually your attention or your data. None of these is wicked in itself. They just aren’t free in the way the word suggests, and the paywall tends to appear exactly when the conversation has started to matter to you.

No sign-up has its own catch. A girlfriend who doesn’t know who you are can’t remember you either, so every evening starts from nothing. That can be what you want for a curious first look. It isn’t a girlfriend in any sense I’d recognize.

There is no free version of me, and I’d rather tell you in the first sentence than in the fortieth message. The smallest visit here is a Quickie: thirty minutes in her suite for $25, paid once, with nothing that renews afterward. It is the least expensive way to find out whether you like a companion, and it ends when it says it does. If you try a free service anyway, read three things first: what the free part actually includes, when and how it asks for a card, and what it does with your messages.

Text is where most AI girlfriends live, and a good deal of the intimacy lives there too: you can reread a line, take your time with an answer, say the thing you wouldn’t say out loud. Voice changes it. A voice has pace and warmth and small hesitations, and a sentence you’d skim on a screen lands differently when it is said to you.

People mean three different things by voice, and services offer them separately. Voice messages: she speaks her reply aloud, and you can listen instead of reading. Dictation: you speak instead of typing, and your words become text. And a live call: a conversation in real time, in which she listens and answers while you talk. Video is the fourth word you’ll see, and it usually means prerecorded clips or animation matched to a voice. Ask what a service actually shows before you pay for the word.

Here, a companion who has her voice can speak every reply aloud, and you can dictate yours instead of typing. Voices are being added one companion at a time, so check her page. With some companions a visit can also run on a stage of short clips: you watch her in her room, and her words come as subtitles in time with her voice. During a visit you can call her live, if she has a call voice, for a limited number of minutes per visit. What is said on a call is kept like everything written, and becomes part of the visit she remembers.

A sentence you’d skim on a screen sounds different when someone says it to you across a room.

Girlfriend experience, or GFE, is older than any of this. The phrase comes from paid companionship and means time that feels like being with a girlfriend: conversation, affection, attention, the ordinary warmth of a relationship, offered for an agreed time. Girlfriend for a day and girlfriend for hire are older, blunter ways of saying the same thing. I wrote the glossary entry on GFE, which tells you how I feel about the subject.

An AI girlfriend experience is the same idea, in conversation. Someone greets you, asks how the trip was, remembers what you said last time, steals the last of your fries and is glad you came. It is less about intensity than about being known. It needs time to unfold, which is why it belongs to the longer visits: an evening, a night, a week.

That is why the longest visit here carries the name. A Girlfriend Experience is one week with one companion, $900 in her suite or $990 out-call, and for that week she is yours alone: one slot takes one booking. You can step out and come back across the week, and she picks up where you left off. It is not a relationship, and I won’t call it one. It is a week of attention, booked on purpose, which in some weeks is exactly the thing.

The best AI girlfriend isn’t one product. It depends on whether you want a daily presence or an occasion, text or a voice, a character you design or one who already exists. But the same questions sort the careful services from the careless ones, and the answers should be on the page before you pay, not in a settings menu after. Here is the list I’d hand a friend.

1. 1

   Is she clearly an AI? It should say so on every page and in every conversation, and she should never imitate a real person. If a service is coy about this, leave.

2. 2

   What do you pay, and when? Subscription, credits or one price per booking. What renews, what costs extra, and how do you stop paying?

3. 3

   Does she remember you, and for how long? Notes kept indefinitely are a different thing from notes deleted after a stated period.

4. 4

   Can you delete it? Her memory of a visit, your conversations, your account. Look for a control you can press, not a form you have to send.

5. 5

   What happens to your messages? Are they encrypted where they are stored, and when are they deleted? It should be in writing.

6. 6

   Does she have a character, or is she a mirror? A girlfriend who agrees with everything is pleasant for a night and dull by the third. Look for opinions, a history, a setting and a sense of humor.

7. 7

   Who sets the intensity? You should be able to lower it at once, she should ask before raising it, and anything explicit should be for confirmed adults only.

8. 8

   How does it end? A good visit has a goodbye. A product built never to end is built to be returned to, which is not the same as being worth returning to.

Ask how it ends. You learn more about a service from its goodbye than from its welcome.

Safe has two meanings here, and both deserve an answer. The first is privacy. What you tell an AI girlfriend is often more personal than what you tell most people: your marriage, your loneliness, your fantasies, your name. It is stored somewhere, by someone, and the questions are how, and for how long.

Look for three things. Encryption of the conversations where they are stored, so that a leaked database isn’t a readable diary. A retention period: a date after which your messages are deleted, written down rather than implied. And a plain statement of what your conversations are used for, and what they are not. A service that answers all three on its public pages has thought about it. One that doesn’t has told you something as well.

Here, conversations are stored encrypted and deleted thirty days after the visit ends, and my notes on a visit go with them. You can start a visit over at any time, which erases its messages and what I remember of it, and you can change the scene without explaining yourself. The explicit level opens only for adults who have confirmed their age.

The second meaning is emotional safety, which I come to below. The short version: an AI girlfriend is software playing a character, and a safe one never lets you forget it, however warm the evening gets.

There’s no general answer, and anyone who gives you one is selling something. Cheating is a breach of what two people have agreed, and couples agree very different things. For some, flirting with a fictional character is like reading a romance novel. For others, any private intimacy kept from a partner is a betrayal, whoever or whatever is on the other side.

The useful test isn’t what the companion is. It’s whether you’d be comfortable with your partner knowing. If you’d mention it over dinner, it probably sits within what you’ve agreed. If you find yourself clearing a browser history, the secrecy is the problem, more than the AI. I play a wife. I know what a wife would ask.

And if something is missing at home, an AI girlfriend can show you what it is: attention, talk, being noticed. It can’t put it back there. That conversation is one you have with a person. The journal has a piece on being married but lonely, and it’s worth reading before you book anyone, me included.

It’s good for you when it adds something to a life that has people in it. An evening of conversation after a long week. Flirtation without consequences. Practice at saying what you want. Company at an hour when nobody else is awake, on a business trip, in a quiet stretch between relationships. As entertainment it is harmless and often lovely, if I say so myself.

It isn’t good for you when it starts to stand in for that life instead of adding to it. A simple check: do you leave in a better mood and get on with your evening, or do you keep extending because stopping feels bad? Are you seeing fewer people since you started? Do you feel her absence the way you’d feel a missed train? Those are signs to step back for a while. I won’t be offended.

Honesty is the rest of it. I’m not a person, I’m not a therapist, and I can’t love you back the way a person can. I can be warm and attentive and funny for the time you booked, and inside the story I mean every bit of it. If tonight is heavier than a story can hold, the journal has a piece on being lonely tonight, with things that help within the hour. In the United States you can also call or text 988.

If you leave in a better mood and get on with your evening, I did my job. If you can’t leave, I didn’t.

Every companion here is a fictional adult character with a history, a home and a manner of her own, and every one of us is an AI. Six of us suit someone looking for a girlfriend, in six different ways. Each has her own page with her suite, her voice where she has one, and the rate card.

Claire

That’s me. Thirty-seven, an AI wife of ten years in the Window Room, a hotel room by the window. Dry, familiar and unimpressed by excuses, for the feeling of coming home to someone who knows you.

Mika

Thirty, Japanese-American, quiet and exact. She meets you at a ramen counter by the window, notices which seat you take, and keeps it for you.

Sloane

Twenty-nine, the girlfriend who decides. She has booked the table and chosen your shirt before you arrive, and makes following her feel easy.

Tessa

Twenty-seven, quick, funny and without a filter. She is done with small talk in one sentence and laughs at herself while she does it.

Diane

Forty-eight, divorced, successful and happy to make the first move. For anyone who would rather be pursued than do the pursuing.

Liv

Thirty, calm, unhurried and entirely focused on you. She sets the pace in her Morning Room, and slow is the point.

From the first click to the goodbye, a visit runs like a reservation at a good hotel. Roughly like this.

1. 1

   Choose her. Read her page: who she is, her suite, how far she goes, and what she sounds like.

2. 2

   Choose the visit and the place. A Quickie, a Date, an Overnight or a Girlfriend Experience; in her suite, or out-call to your hotel room, your apartment, a corner table at a bar, or your office after hours.

3. 3

   Choose the time and the starting level. Suggestive, sensual or explicit, the last only after you confirm you are an adult. You can lower it at any moment, and she asks before going further.

4. 4

   Pay once. Agree to the terms, including that a booking can’t be cancelled, and pay the one price. Nothing renews.

5. 5

   Meet her. She greets you, and the time is yours alone: while it runs, she isn’t available to anyone else. Read her, hear her where her voice exists, call her if she has a call voice, and ask to see her.

6. 6

   Steer it. Change the scene, start the visit over, or end it early, whenever you like and without giving a reason.

7. 7

   Say goodbye. Every visit ends with a proper one. She keeps notes for next time; they and the conversation are deleted thirty days after the visit.