Candy AI Review: Tokens, Prices, and the Encryption Claim

Candy.ai's homepage says your conversations are end-to-end encrypted. Its privacy notice says third-party language model providers may receive the content of your messages.

Direct answer first, since this is a Candy AI review and the question is whether it's worth paying for. The product is a web-only companion platform run by EverAI Limited in Malta, and today its subscription page shows $13.99 for a month, $26.97 for three months and $47.88 for a year. Free gets you five messages in total, one custom character and one image. Paid gets unlimited chat plus 100 tokens a month, and the tokens are the real currency, because images, voice, video and the premium extras all draw on them. Refunds are possible for 24 hours after payment, provided you've used 20 tokens or fewer. The memory system is tied to individual chats rather than to you, there's no native app, and the privacy notice reads very differently from the marketing FAQ sitting above it.

Everything here was read off candy.ai, its terms of service, its privacy notice and its Zendesk help centre on 15 September 2026. Where the company's own documents disagree with each other, I show both.

The Price Page, With the Billed Totals

Most reviews of this product quote a monthly figure they were shown on some earlier date. The live plan page is more specific than that, and the specifics are the useful part.

Read from candy.ai/subscriptions on 2026-09-15, logged out.

The discount percentages are measured against the monthly price, which is standard practice and also why the 70% badge on the homepage has nothing visible to discount from until you reach this page. Every plan carries the same line underneath, that it renews automatically for the same price and term, and that local taxes may apply on top.

Two more cadences sit in the page's payment modal without a plan card. The markup lists a payment every two weeks billed as $9.79 and a weekly payment billed as $5.60. I can't tell you which payment methods or countries surface those, only that a weekly plan works out at more per month than the monthly plan does, so if you're offered one at checkout, that's the maths to do first.

The plan page also says the product is trusted by 50 million users with over a thousand ratings. That's the company's own number and I'm passing it on as such.

A tier above all of this called Premium Plus exists in the help centre, with a price I could not find on any page that loads without an account. More on what it includes below.

Five Messages, One Character, One Picture

Candy publishes its free tier in numbers, which almost nobody in this category does.

The help article for free users, updated 5 August 2026, lists three things. You can send up to five messages in chat, and that's across all characters rather than per character. You can create one custom AI character. You can generate one image, either in the generator or in a chat. The terms of service say the same thing in slightly softer language, that a free user "may generally" send a maximum of five messages.

Five is a demonstration rather than a trial. Nobody is going to evaluate memory, tone or consistency in five messages, and I don't think the company expects you to. What the free tier confirms is that the site loads, the characters look the way the landing page suggests, and the image generator produces something. It's a preview of the shop window, which matters more here than on most platforms for a reason the next section gets to.

What a Hundred Tokens Actually Buy

Paid subscribers get unlimited text messaging and 100 tokens credited on their renewal day each month, with annual subscribers still receiving 100 a month while being charged once a year. Regular chatting doesn't cost tokens. Almost everything else does.

The help centre's own list of what tokens buy includes image generation, creating a custom AI, listening to a voice message, voice calls in beta, private content packs, and converting a generated image into a short video. A newer feature called Candy Roulette, a video-chat matching mode, costs five tokens a minute. Exclusive promotional characters open for a set number of tokens, with 200 given as the example.

Compiled from the help centre's free, paid and Premium Plus articles, updated between 4 and 28 August 2026.

What's a token worth? Candy tells you, in a roundabout way. The referral article says you and a friend each receive 200 tokens on a successful referral and describes that as "a $20 value". Ten cents a token, by the company's own arithmetic. I couldn't load the top-up bundle prices themselves because candy.ai/tokens redirects to a sign-in screen, so that implied rate is the only one I'll use.

Run it through the plans and something odd falls out. The monthly allowance of 100 tokens is worth $10 at that rate, against a $13.99 subscription. The annual plan delivers 1,200 tokens across the year, which is $120 of implied value for a $47.88 charge. Roulette at five tokens a minute means the whole monthly allowance is twenty minutes of video chat. And the refund threshold of 20 tokens is two dollars' worth.

That last one is the number to hold onto. The refund window is 24 hours, but the tokens condition bites first. Generate a few pictures on day one and the refund is gone regardless of the clock, and the help article on this, updated 7 September 2026, adds that cancelling a subscription does not itself trigger a refund. You have to ask support, within the day, having barely touched the thing.

One inconsistency in this area is worth knowing. The help centre says cancelling your subscription keeps your remaining tokens on the account, hidden while you're on Free and restored if you resubscribe. The terms of service, revised 17 August 2026, say that at the end of the billing period any remaining tokens "will expire and become unusable" and will not carry over. Those can't both be right, and if it ever matters to you, the terms are the document you agreed to.

Two Pages, Two Answers on Privacy

This is the section I'd want anyone to read before subscribing, and it needs both documents open side by side.

The homepage carries an FAQ block. One answer says Candy AI uses end-to-end encryption to keep all conversations safe and confidential, and that your data is never shared or sold. Another says the platform is GDPR-compliant and uses discreet billing.

The privacy notice, revised 30 July 2026, lists the categories of recipient the company shares personal data with. Among the service providers it names "third-party LLM providers and/or hosters", and then adds, in the same sentence, that these third parties may receive the content of your messages exchanged with the chatbot. A line above that says sharing may involve transferring data outside the European Union, including to the United States. A separate section says your interactions, including prompts and outputs, may be aggregated or de-identified to train and develop the company's AI models and moderation tools, with human review of de-identified interactions listed as a possibility.

None of that is unusual for a hosted companion product, and I'd expect most of Candy's competitors to have something similar in their notices. What's unusual is the sentence on the homepage. End-to-end encryption means the operator can't read the content in transit or at rest. A service that sends your messages to an external model provider to generate the reply cannot, by definition, be doing that, and the privacy notice is the document that describes what actually happens. The FAQ is marketing. The notice is the contract.

The bank statement answer has a smaller version of the same gap. The homepage says the charge appears under a neutral merchant name with no direct reference to Candy AI. The help centre says the charge is displayed as "EverAI". Both are true, since EverAI is the parent company rather than the brand, but "neutral" is doing some work in that sentence.

Memory Belongs to the Chat

Candy's landing page talks about memory retention and a companion that remembers what matters. The help centre describes something narrower, and I find the help centre version more useful.

Detailed conversation memory is, in the company's words, "generally tied to the active chat itself". Reset Chat starts the interaction fresh. Delete Chat removes the thread permanently, with a separate article confirming that deleted conversations cannot be recovered. And there is currently no way to clear a chat's history without also resetting its memory, because the two are one thing.

So the memory you build with a character lives inside that thread. Start a second chat with the same character and you start over. The workaround is Clone Chat, which copies the history to that point and lets you branch, and Premium Plus subscribers get five clones plus 20 "memory slots", a term the help centre lists without defining. Plus also adds a persona, a profile of you that every character can read, with a bio, a relationship field and an intimacy field reserved for that tier.

No context size is published anywhere I looked, which is normal for the category and which is why I'd distrust any review that tells you how many days the memory lasts. There's also no intensity slider or global tone control, per the help centre, so the tools you have are the character description, your own phrasing and the regenerate button. Some characters run in a "Realistic" mode that sends photos, voice notes and videos unprompted, and since listening to a voice message is on the list of things tokens pay for, the toggles beside the gift icon in the chat window are worth finding on day one.

The part of this that's a real limitation rather than a quirk is that nothing leaves. A character you build, the persona you fill in and the threads you've invested in all sit in EverAI's database with no export, the same lock-in the character creation breakdown found across the whole category.

There Is No App, and Three Apps Called Candy

The help centre is direct about this. Candy.ai does not offer a native iOS or Android app. What it offers is a progressive web app, which is the website added to your home screen with the browser chrome hidden and push notifications switched on.

That's a defensible choice for a product whose content wouldn't pass app store review, and it's also why the store-side protections covered in the web-only platform comparison don't apply here. No store refund form, no store cancellation screen, no published age rating. All of that is handled by EverAI's own terms, where the 24-hour rule and the chargeback clause live.

It also creates a lookalike problem. Searching the US App Store for "candy ai" on the fetch date returned 22 apps. None of them is published by EverAI Limited. Three carry the word Candy in the title, from three unrelated sellers, with 47, 16 and nine ratings respectively. If you go to a store expecting to find this product, you'll find something else wearing its name, and the something else will have its own terms, its own prices and its own privacy panel.

One Year to Ten Years

The privacy notice publishes a retention schedule, which puts Candy ahead of most of the field on candour whatever you think of the numbers.

Account data is kept for three years after your last activity. That can be shortened, for operational reasons, to one year after your last activity or after your paid subscription ended, whichever is later. Financial and transactional records are kept for ten years from issuance, attributed to tax and accounting law. Log files, which include your interactions with the platform and timestamps, are deleted after 30 days. Deleting your account, which the help centre routes through My Profile, Settings and a section called Danger Zone, removes your preferences and history while the legally mandated retention continues.

The terms of service add a clause I haven't seen phrased this way elsewhere. The company may remove account content after defined periods of inactivity, and content removed that way is not subject to reimbursement or restoration. Combined with the one-year floor in the privacy notice, that means a free account left alone for a year may come back to find its characters and chats gone, and the terms say that's fine.

Characters can also disappear while you're active. The help centre lists reasons including moderation reviews and "licensing/model changes", and says the return of any specific character can't be guaranteed. That's an honest thing to write down. It's also a reminder that the character you're paying to talk to is licensed content on somebody else's server.

Questions

Is Candy AI free? For five messages, one character and one image, yes. After that it's a subscription, and the subscription's real meter is tokens.

How much does Candy AI cost? $13.99 monthly, $26.97 per quarter or $47.88 per year on the page loaded today, plus whatever tokens you buy on top. Third-party reviews I read during the autopsy quote $12.99 and $69.99, which don't match the live page, so check the page rather than a review, including this one, on the day you decide.

Is Candy AI safe? Its transactions are card-processed under the parent company's name, its policies are published and dated, and it names a Maltese entity with a registry number, which is more than most of its competitors manage. Whether your chats are private is the question the two documents above answer differently, and I'd go with the privacy notice.

Does Candy AI have an app? No. A home-screen web app on both platforms, installed from the browser.

Does it do video? In two forms. Generated images can be converted into short clips, and a preset builder assembles a scene from character, action and location menus. Direct video from a text prompt isn't supported, per the help centre. Live Action, the interactive mode, is Premium-only, token-gated and currently mobile-only on selected characters.

Can I get a refund? Within 24 hours of payment, if you've used 20 tokens or fewer, and only for card purchases. EU and UK users have a 14-day withdrawal right written into the terms.

Who checks your age? The privacy notice mentions third-party age estimation and verification results as data the company may hold, depending on location, without saying where that applies. The underage policy itself, and how it compares with the rest of the category, is covered in the age gate audit.

What I'd Do Before Paying

Decide whether you want the images, because that's what you'd be paying for. Unlimited text is the headline, a hundred tokens is the constraint, and if pictures and voice are the draw you'll be topping up at something near the referral article's ten cents a token.

Then read the privacy notice's recipients section rather than the homepage FAQ, and decide how you feel about your messages passing through an external model provider, possibly in another jurisdiction. Nothing on the site is hiding this. It's just on the second page rather than the first.

Then, if you subscribe, don't generate anything on the first day until you're sure. Twenty tokens is a low ceiling and the refund route closes the moment you cross it, which makes the first 24 hours a period for reading the character library and the settings screen rather than for testing the generator.

And keep the annual plan in perspective. At $47.88 it's cheap against the monthly price and cheaper still against the implied value of its own token allowance, which is either a generous deal or a sign that the company expects the allowance to run out and the top-ups to follow. My guess is the second. The full price picture for this product against its competitors sits in the main AI girlfriend app guide.