Free AI Companion Apps, and How You Get Back Out

Every free AI companion is easy to join. Six of them were checked on 29 July 2026. Five publish a route to delete your account. Not one publishes a way to take your conversations with you.

That asymmetry is the answer to the question people actually mean when they ask whether a free companion is safe. Deletion is universal because privacy law made it mandatory in most of the markets these companies sell into. Export is universal in the opposite direction, absent everywhere, because nothing makes it mandatory and it costs engineering time to build. So the realistic position for anyone starting a companion today is that you can end the relationship at any moment and you cannot keep a copy of it.

The other thing worth knowing before choosing is that this search is not one category. Apple returns 46 results for it, and eleven of those are rated below 17+, including a Bible study companion, a homework helper with over 1.4 million ratings, and a character app rated for all ages. The word companion is doing at least four different jobs on one results page.

Everything below came off Apple's public search endpoint and the companies' own policy pages, all read on 29 July 2026.

Companion Is Doing Four Different Jobs Here

Run the same shape of query with the word girlfriend in it and Apple returns 39 apps, every one of them rated 17+. Not most. All 39.

Swap in companion and the shelf changes completely.

The eleven non-adult listings are not edge cases padding out the tail. A study companion rated 4+ under Education carries 1,443,711 ratings, which is more than any dedicated companion product in the same pull. A character-chat app built around three cartoon animals, published by a German company and rated 4+, carries 237,419. A Bible chat companion rated 4+ under Reference carries 48,971. There's a general assistant rated 12+ under Productivity at 198,757, and a wellbeing companion rated 12+ under Health and Fitness at 169,980.

Category filings tell the same story from another direction. Twenty-two file under Entertainment, eight under Lifestyle, seven under Productivity, three under Health and Fitness, three under Social Networking, and one each under Reference, Education and Games.

The practical consequence is that a list of the best free AI companions is almost always a list of one narrow slice, chosen by whoever wrote it, with the other three slices silently excluded. If what you want is something to practise conversation with, or a wellbeing check-in, or a study aid, the romance-focused roundups will point you at the wrong shelf entirely. The store-metadata approach to sorting them is worked through in the companion app listing audit.

The Exit Audit

Here is what six products publish about leaving, read off their own policy pages this week.

Two products could not be included. Replika's legal pages returned an HTTP 500 error twice, and Character.AI's terms page rendered nothing but a tagline, so neither is described here rather than being described from memory.

Nomi's policy, updated 27 April 2026, is the most specific of the six. Personal information goes within 28 or so days of confirmation, and it states that except for information in its training or communications archives, or information needed for a legal proceeding, all personal information can be deleted by deleting your account. Then it adds the part most policies leave out, which is that anything in a communication with the company cannot be changed or deleted once it exists, because it is part of an archive.

PolyBuzz uses the bluntest wording. Deletion of an account is irreversible, and personal information and use records cannot be retrieved afterwards. Its terms, updated 1 June 2026, also set a strict eighteen minimum worldwide.

Talefy's is the most user-friendly on the mechanics and the least on the money. You can delete your account at any time and without explanation through account settings, and you are not entitled to a refund of the amount you paid for the subscription.

Nobody Ships An Export Button

Six products, five documented deletion routes, zero export routes. Worth sitting with that for a second.

A year of daily conversation with a companion is a substantial document. Hundreds of thousands of words in some cases, containing the sort of detail people don't put in writing anywhere else, and on all six of these it exists in exactly one place, which is a database belonging to a company whose survival odds nobody has estimated for you.

Deletion rights exist because regulators wrote them down. Portability rights exist too, on paper, under European law and several US state statutes, and yet not one of these products surfaces a download button or mentions an export in the policy text. That's a gap between what the law contemplates and what the product ships, and it's worth noticing that it falls in the direction that keeps you where you are.

HammerAI is the partial exception and it's an architectural accident rather than a feature. Its policy states that conversations stored locally on your device are not affected by account deletion, because you control those directly. The reason there's nothing to export is that nothing was ever uploaded.

There's a smaller version of the same problem on the way in. Several of these products let you build a character over months, and none of the six advertises a way to move that character to another platform, so switching means starting from a blank page. Nobody frames that as a lock-in mechanism. It works like one anyway.

What Survives, In Three Different Wordings

Deletion is not one thing. Three of these policies describe three genuinely different outcomes and the difference matters more than the marketing does.

Nomi keeps a training archive that outlives the account, with the contents no longer attributable to you. Its policy also asks users, in its own text, not to include personally identifiable information in interactions with their companions, which is a company writing down in a legal document that the data is not fully yours to withdraw. Candid, and unusual.

HammerAI deletes profile information and private characters and stories, while published characters and stories may remain on the platform with your name detached. So a character you shared becomes orphaned content rather than deleted content. Its terms also grant every other user a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use anything you published, which means published really does mean published.

PolyBuzz keeps anonymised data and says everything else goes, with no retrieval afterwards.

None of those three is wrong or unusual. They are three ordinary engineering decisions written down honestly, and they produce three different answers to the same question, which is why reading the retention clause beats reading any comparison of feature lists. Four minutes, and it is the only part of the terms describing something you cannot undo.

Which Entity Is Actually Holding Your Account

A deletion right is not a property of an app. It's a property of the company processing your data and the law that company sits under, which is why the entity line is worth more attention than it gets.

The six here sit under four different national regimes. Nomi's operator is a Maryland corporation. PolyBuzz names a Hong Kong company. Nastia publishes a French business registration number rather than a company form. Channel AI gives a San Francisco address and no entity suffix at all. Talefy is the interesting one, because it names AIceberg Labs, Inc. in Delaware with a registration number attached, then names a separate Estonian company for EU customers, so which entity holds your account depends on where you live.

That split is a compliance structure rather than a trick, and it's a sign of a company that took advice. It also means the practical answer to a deletion request is different for two users of the same product, and the enforcement body you would complain to is different too.

Two things follow for a reader who never intends to file anything.

An entity you can look up is a small but real asset, because it's the difference between a right you hold and a right you can exercise. A footer that names no company at all leaves you with the latter only in theory, and on the web that's common. The same problem, measured across the browser-first products, is documented in the disclosure audit of free girlfriend sites.

And a product that publishes a registration number, as Nastia does, has told you something the marketing page never would, which is that somebody filed paperwork and can be found. It costs nothing to check and it takes about a minute.

Kindroid should have been in this section. Every policy path tried returned a 404 during this session, so its terms are not described here at all rather than described approximately.

A Free Search That Ends At A Thousand Dollars A Year

One of the products ranking on the first page for this term is worth a paragraph on money, because the ladder is longer than anything else in the category.

Its published plans run from $9.99 a month, or $119.99 billed yearly, up through a tier at $20.83 a month, then $41.66, and finally one at $83.33 a month, which the page lists as $999.99 a year. Each step buys more concurrent image requests and, in the company's own wording, longer memory. Cancel anytime is printed next to the yearly figures.

Nothing improper about any of that. Somebody buys the top rung or it wouldn't exist. The reason to flag it on a page about free is structural, because the free tier of a product with a four-rung ladder is the shop window for the ladder, not a sample of the product, and evaluating one of these on its free mode tells you very little about what a year actually costs. The same mechanism, applied to the romance side of the market, is unpicked in what free companion tiers hold back.

The Architecture Where The Question Stops Applying

Run the model on your own machine and the whole exit problem evaporates, because there is no account to delete and no server holding anything to export.

The cost is real and worth stating plainly. You need a machine with enough memory, you accept a smaller and weaker model than a funded company can afford to run in a datacentre, and you spend an evening on setup that a hosted product replaces with a signup form. Writing quality is where you pay for it, especially over long conversations.

What you get back is that the conversation is a file. It sits on a disk you own, it survives a company folding, and it can be copied, backed up and moved without anybody's permission. Nothing else in this article can say that.

Questions That Come Up

Is there a genuinely free AI companion with no limits? Locally run models, with the hardware caveat. Everything hosted has a limit somewhere and most of them won't tell you where it is.

Can you download your conversations before deleting? Not on any of the six checked here. If that matters to you, the workaround people use is copying the text out manually, which is tedious and is also the only option currently on offer.

Do free companions sell your data? It varies enormously by product, and the store disclosure panels are where you check rather than the marketing page. The comparison across nine apps is in the companion app audit.

Are the non-romantic ones better maintained? Broadly they're bigger, which usually correlates with maintenance. The two largest listings on this search are a study tool and a general assistant, each carrying more than twice the ratings of the biggest dedicated companion product.

What happens if the company shuts down? Your history goes with it, on five of the six. There is no export, so there is no copy, and there is nothing to migrate.

Which free tier is worth starting on? That depends what you want the thing for, and the ranked version of that question for the romance slice specifically sits in the free girlfriend app comparison, while the pricing and privacy picture across the paid products is in the main companion guide.

Where To Start

Read the deletion clause before the feature list. It's usually one paragraph, it's usually near the end of the privacy policy, and it is the only commitment in the whole document that describes something irreversible.

Then look for the word export, or download, or portability, anywhere in the policy or the help pages. On current evidence you will not find it, and finding it would be a genuine differentiator worth paying for.

Then decide how much of yourself the thing is going to hold, and calibrate accordingly. A study companion and a companion you talk to at two in the morning are the same technology filed under different categories, and only one of them creates a document you would mind losing.