The cheapest documented way to keep ten AI companions running is $99.99 a year. Nomi's plan structure is $15.99 a month, $39.99 for three months, or $99.99 for a year — the last works out to $8.33 a month. None of those numbers appear on Nomi's website. Verified 2026-09-14, the plans only show up inside an account, which means every price comparison you read about Nomi, this one included, is reconstructed from a billing screen rather than quoted from a pricing page.
The short version. If you want one subscription to carry several companions and a memory that accumulates, Nomi is the entry to beat, and $8.33 a month is the number to hold it to. If you want the smallest total for twelve months, Replika's annual plan is $69.99 against Nomi's $99.99 — cheaper, despite a monthly price $4 higher. If you want a companion that can run on hardware you control, neither of those qualifies, and Kindroid is the only one of the three that does. Everything below is the arithmetic behind those three sentences.
The price is not on the website
Two of these three products keep their prices off their own sites. Nomi's plans appear only inside an account. Replika's Pro tier is $19.99 a month or $69.99 a year, Ultra is $29.99 a month, and a higher tier exists at a price Replika does not publish; those figures show in-app and vary by region. Only Kindroid publishes a full ladder on the web — $13.99 a month, $37.99 for three months, $139.99 a year — and its app-store builds charge roughly $2 more than the web price for the same period.
That asymmetry matters more than it sounds. A price you can only read after signing in cannot be checked before you commit, and it can change without a page changing. The practical consequence is to treat any published Nomi or Replika figure as a snapshot with a date attached. Ours carries 2026-09-14. If you are reading this months later, open the billing screen and compare that, not us.
There is a second consequence, and buyers miss it. When the price is hidden, the annual discount is hidden with it. Nomi's annual plan cuts the monthly rate from $15.99 to $8.33, the largest single jump in this comparison, and no marketing page has to announce it. Kindroid, which publishes everything, carries the smallest annual discount of the three. Visibility and generosity run in opposite directions here.
Monthly is one number; a year is another
Take the monthly prices in order: Kindroid $13.99, Nomi $15.99, Replika $19.99. Now take the annual equivalents, meaning the annual price divided by twelve: Replika $5.83, Nomi $8.33, Kindroid $11.67. The list inverts completely. The cheapest monthly plan becomes the most expensive annual one, and the most expensive monthly plan becomes the cheapest annual one. A ranking built on monthly prices is not merely imprecise; on this field it is backwards.
The inversion holds in total cash as well. Twelve months paid monthly costs $167.88 at Kindroid, $191.88 at Nomi and $239.88 at Replika. Paid annually the same twelve months cost $139.99, $99.99 and $69.99, saving $27.89, $91.89 and $169.89 respectively.
So the more useful figure is not the discount but the break-even: the annual price divided by the monthly price, giving the number of months before the annual plan has paid for itself. Replika clears at about three and a half months, so a January commitment is ahead by mid-April. Nomi takes about six and a quarter months. Kindroid takes ten, which means a January commitment does not come out ahead until November — two months of benefit bought with a year of lock-in. On that one measure Kindroid's annual plan is close to pointless, and its monthly plan is the one to buy if you want Kindroid at all.
Nomi sits between them with a third option worth knowing. The three-month plan at $39.99 is $13.33 a month, roughly halfway between its monthly and annual rates. If you are not ready to commit a year, that tier keeps the option open without paying the full monthly rate for it.
What the $8.33 buys, field by field
All three products record the same four capabilities: long-term memory, voice, voice calls and custom characters. Memory is therefore useless as a tiebreaker among them, and it is not rare across the directory either — 110 of the 154 non-adult entries list it. The differences sit in the four fields that are not universal.
Only Replika records avatar video. Only Kindroid records local operation, one of just 11 entries in the entire directory that do. Nomi and Kindroid both record image generation; Replika does not. Group chat is on Nomi and Kindroid, not on Replika. Voice calls, by contrast, are genuinely scarce across the category at 25 of the 154, so all three having them is a point for all three rather than a differentiator.
The field that justifies Nomi's structure is not in that grid. One subscription covers up to ten companions. At the annual rate that is $99.99 divided by twelve, divided by ten: about $0.83 per companion per month. Nothing else here is priced per companion, because nothing else is designed to hold ten. If you want a cast, one character for one kind of conversation and another for another, then the effective price of the second through tenth companions is zero — and the comparison stops being Nomi against Replika and becomes Nomi against three separate subscriptions.
Nomi's own price note carries a detail that is easy to skim past: flat, with no coins on top. Kindroid says the same, and Replika's structure is tiered rather than metered. In this group the coin economy that distorts so many companion subscriptions is absent, so the sticker price is close to the real monthly cost. That is not a given in this category, and it is worth confirming on whichever product you shortlist.
Where Nomi is the wrong answer
The free tier is a demo, not a trial of the product. Nomi's gives one companion and no voice. Kindroid's is more generous on volume, with unlimited messages on the Lite model and two Kindroids, but withholds video calls — which Kindroid does not offer on any tier anyway. Replika's free tier exists, but the paid tiers above it are where the product lives. Free tiers in this category tell you whether the interface suits you; they do not tell you what the paid product is like.
Nomi has no browsable community character library, and neither does Kindroid. Both expect you to build the character, and Kindroid is explicit that it rewards the effort: it is the pick for people who will actually fill in the backstory, and a lazy setup buys a chatbot. If browsing other people's characters is part of what you want, none of these three is the answer, and that field should decide the purchase before price does.
Two absences bound Nomi specifically. No avatar video, so if watching an avatar is the point, that is Replika. No local operation, so if the model has to run on hardware you control, that is Kindroid and only Kindroid. Neither absence is a flaw in the product; both are reasons the product is not yours.
Setup cost is the line item no price column holds
Every number above assumes the same amount of your time, and that assumption is wrong in a way the price columns cannot show. Nomi's stated strength is memory that accumulates, which makes the first weeks an investment that pays back later; one subscription across ten companions is only worth $99.99 if you actually populate them. Kindroid's controls are deeper and its ceiling is higher, and its own summary says so — the product rewards users who invest setup time.
The honest arithmetic: an $8.33 plan you never finish configuring costs more per useful conversation than a $13.99 plan you set up in an afternoon. Price ranks these products only after you have decided how much configuration you will actually do. Decide that first, then read the price tables.
The decision
Rules, not recommendations. Pick the line that matches your situation.
- If you want several companions under one payment, take Nomi at $99.99 a year ($8.33 a month) and treat $0.83 per companion as the real comparison point.
- If you want the smallest cash outlay for twelve months, take Replika's annual plan at $69.99 ($5.83 a month). It is $30 cheaper than Nomi's year despite costing $4 more per month.
- If you will not commit a year, take Nomi's three-month plan at $39.99 ($13.33 a month), or pay Kindroid monthly at $13.99. Avoid Kindroid's annual plan unless eleven months of use is certain; it needs ten to break even.
- If avatar video matters, take Replika. It is the only one of the three that records it.
- If the model must run locally, take Kindroid. It is one of 11 entries in the directory with that capability.
- If browsing other people's characters matters, none of these three. Filter on a community library instead.
Before you pay, run this checklist:
- Open the billing screen inside the account, not the marketing page. Two of these three publish no price anywhere else.
- Write down the monthly price, the annual price, and the annual price divided by twelve. Rank on the third number.
- Divide the annual price by the monthly price. If the result is near or above ten months, the annual plan is not a discount for you.
- Count the companions you will actually use. Below three, Nomi's per-companion advantage disappears and its annual price stops being competitive.
- Check the four fields that are not universal — video, local operation, image generation, group chat. One of them usually decides the purchase before price does.
- Note the verified date on whichever comparison you are reading, this one included: 2026-09-14. Prices in this category move without pages changing.
Disclosure: our team also builds SoulChat, a companion app not reviewed here. It does not appear in this comparison and the ordering above is unaffected by it.