Disclosure: We run this directory and we also build SoulChat, one of the products in the table below. SoulChat is listed on the same terms as every other entry, it does not get a higher position than its data earns, and paid placements on this site are labelled and sold separately from editorial. Where a judgement is close, we say so instead of picking our own product.
The three products in this comparison are usually sold on the same promise: one companion, remembered over time. They arrive at it from very different directions, and the price you pay for that promise differs by a factor of two.
We are not going to describe how their memory works internally. Neither vendor documents their retrieval pipeline in a way we can verify, and "five-tier memory" claims are marketing until someone tests them on your conversation, not theirs. What follows is limited to what a buyer can actually check before paying: entry price, annual effective price, free-tier limits, platform coverage, and the specific things each one refuses to do.
All figures below were read from vendor pricing and product pages on 2026-09-14 and stored in our directory. Prices in this category change without notice, and two of these three vendors do not publish prices on their public website at all — the numbers come from inside an account.
The numbers first
| Kindroid | Nomi | SoulChat | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry monthly | $13.99 | $15.99 | $9.99 |
| Annual effective | $11.67/mo ($139.99/yr) | $8.33/mo ($99.99/yr) | — |
| Free tier | Lite model, unlimited messages, 2 companions, no video calls | One companion, no voice | Limited daily messages, 1 custom character |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android | Web, iOS, Android | Web |
| Voice calls | Yes | Yes | No |
| Group chat | Yes | Yes | No |
| Runs locally | Yes | No | No |
| Price visible before signup | No (app store price runs ~$2 higher) | No | Yes |
Two things jump out. Kindroid's annual plan is the most expensive per month in this table at $11.67 — but Nomi's annual comes to $8.33, which is cheaper than Kindroid despite a higher monthly sticker. If you are comparing these two, compare the annual row, not the monthly one. And Nomi's annual is 48% off its monthly, the steepest discount here, which tells you what the monthly price is for: people who will not commit.
Kindroid: the setup tax is the product
Kindroid's pitch is depth of control. Backstory, personality instructions, speech patterns, response directives, a journal you write yourself — the tools are real and they are extensive. The reviews that praise it are praising that.
The honest counterweight is that the default is thin. A companion with an empty backstory behaves like a generic chatbot with a name attached, and the gap between a blank Kindroid and a well-built one is larger than the gap between most products on this list. That is a design choice, not a defect, but it changes who the product is for: Kindroid is excellent for people who enjoy the build, and mediocre for people who want to open an app and meet someone.
Its structural weak point is discovery. There is no browsable library of community characters — you build yours or you start from nothing. Compare Character.AI, where 20M+ published characters mean you never face a blank page but you inherit everyone else's taste.
Also worth noting for anyone outside the US: the app store subscription runs roughly $2/month more than the web price. Buy on the web.
Nomi: the discount is the argument
Nomi's monthly price is the highest here at $15.99, and its annual effective price is the lowest at $8.33. That inversion is the whole story of the product. On an annual plan it undercuts Kindroid by 29% and Character.AI's c.ai+ by 5%, while offering voice and group chat that Character.AI's base tier does not include.
The free tier, though, is a demo rather than a free tier: one companion, no voice. If your plan is "try it free and decide", you are testing a cut-down version of the thing you would actually buy.
Nomi also flat-prices: one subscription covers up to ten companions and there is no coin currency on top. In a category where the median product meters images, voice minutes, or "charms" separately, that is a genuine differentiator rather than a feature-list one.
SoulChat: fewer choices, and that is the trade
We build SoulChat, so weigh this section accordingly.
The product is a small set of human-written characters rather than a character builder or a marketplace — the opposite bet from Kindroid's. The argument for it is that pre-written characters are consistent from the first message with no setup; the argument against it is that you cannot reshape them, and if the written personality does not fit you, there is no tuning that fixes it. It is also web-only, and it has no voice calls or group chat, which at $9.99/month against a $8.33 annual Nomi is a real gap rather than a matter of taste.
Where it genuinely competes is the entry price and a free tier you can evaluate without a card. Where it does not compete is multimedia and platform coverage. If you need voice calls on your phone, this is not the product, and no amount of memory quality changes that.
How to decide in five minutes
Pick Kindroid if you will actually fill in a backstory and you want voice calls plus a local option. Budget $13.99/month on web, or $139.99/year if you are sure.
Pick Nomi if continuity is the requirement and you are willing to commit annually. At $8.33/month effective with ten companions included and no coin top-ups, it is the cheapest way to buy a memory-first product — but only if you pay yearly.
Pick SoulChat if you want to evaluate without a card and you care about a written character more than about tuning one. Accept that you are giving up voice and mobile.
Pick none of them if what you actually want is content freedom. All three are filtered products, in different degrees. Choosing between filtered companions when what you want is an unfiltered one is the most common buying mistake in this category — and no amount of comparison shopping fixes a category error.
What we could not verify
Neither Kindroid nor Nomi publishes prices on its public site. Both figures above come from inside an account, and both vary by region and by app store. We have not tested memory retention over a multi-month conversation on any of the three, so we make no claim about which remembers better — only about what each charges and what each includes. If a vendor changes its annual discount, the ranking of the annual-effective column changes with it, and that column is the one that matters.
Prices and feature data verified 2026-09-14 against vendor pages and recorded in the iSoulChat directory. See the [full AI companion directory](/) for current entries, or compare [all memory-focused companions](/c/memory/).