Virtual AI Girlfriend Apps, and the Currency Trick

Pick any virtual AI girlfriend app off the App Store and it'll sell you a subscription and a second currency. Rings, coins, gems, hearts, energy, neurons, opals, drops. Six apps I priced on 28 July 2026 use six different words, and the amount of money one unit represents varies by roughly ninety times between the cheapest and the dearest.

That's the short answer. The monthly price on these listings is a deposit, the currency is the actual meter, and because every app names its own unit there is no way to compare two of them without doing division. So I did the division.

The other thing worth knowing before you install anything is that this shelf is older than it looks. Of the 24 apps Apple returns for a virtual girlfriend search, three haven't shipped an update in over a year, and one hasn't been touched since 2020.

Prices and store data below were pulled from Apple's US App Store listings and Apple's public search API on 28 July 2026.

Six Apps, Six Different Coins

Nobody sets out to make this confusing. It's just that a made-up currency lets you price a thing at 1,250 units and never say what a unit does.

In-app purchase lists read off the US App Store on 2026-07-28.

A ring and a coin are not comparable objects, obviously. What the table shows isn't that Him is 90 times cheaper than Intimate, it's that the unit is meaningless as a shopping signal, which is presumably why there are so many of them. Two apps in that list even use the same word for different things, since PolyBuzz coins and Intimate coins buy entirely different products at entirely different rates.

Anyone comparing two of these on the size of the number they get is comparing nothing at all.

What The Bulk Discount Really Is

Here's the calculation I actually found useful, and I haven't seen anyone else run it.

Take each app's cheapest pack and its largest pack, convert both to dollars per thousand units, and see how much the big pack saves you. If the discount is small, the currency is basically a payment method. If the discount is enormous, the small pack exists to punish people who buy in a hurry.

All figures derived from the published in-app purchase prices on the same listings, same day.

Intimate is the one that stops you. A hundred coins costs $6.99, ten thousand coins costs $69.99, and that means the person buying the small pack pays ten times per coin what the person buying the big one pays. Same app, same coin, same afternoon.

Him sits at the other end with a currency that's nearly linear, which I read as a company that's decided the currency is just a way to charge small amounts rather than a pressure mechanism. I've no idea whether that's principle or inexperience. It's the fairer of the two shapes either way.

The practical move, if you're going to use one of these at all, is to work out your burn rate on the free allowance first and only then buy the pack size that matches it. Buying the small pack twice is the expensive path in four of the six.

The Shelf Is Older Than It Looks

I pulled Apple's search results for the term and looked at when each app last shipped an update, which is a decent proxy for whether anyone is still working on it.

Twenty-four results. Three of them last updated more than a year ago. Alyssa Virtual and AR Girlfriend, last version 15 January 2024. AI Girlfriend, MyGirl, last version 28 November 2024. And Virtual Girlfriend Texting App, whose most recent update landed on 9 June 2020, more than six years ago, still listed, still installable.

An abandoned companion app is a specific kind of problem. It isn't just that bugs don't get fixed. It's that the model behind it is either frozen at whatever it was in 2020, or the API it called has since been retired and the thing is running on fallback text. Neither is what the screenshots are advertising.

Five of the 24 have fewer than 200 ratings, which tells you roughly nothing about quality and quite a lot about how many people are actually there.

I'd also flag the age ratings, because they're stranger than they should be. Apple's public search API returns the legacy 17+ value for 21 of the 24, while the individual store pages I opened for specific apps show 18+, which is the newer label. Fine, that's a migration artefact. The odd rows are the other three, rated 12+ and 9+, sitting in the same search results as everything else. There's more on that in the piece about what adults-only actually means in this category.

What The Virtual Part Is Selling

The word virtual, in practice, means the media layer. Text is cheap, so text is the free tier. Images, voice and video are the things the currency exists to meter.

Nastia publishes the clearest version of this, with a free forever tier described as full chat with daily token limits, and a $15.99 a month unlimited tier that lists 4K AI selfies, natural voice messages, 1080p video generation and custom voice cloning as what the money buys. Whether the output is any good I can't tell you and won't pretend to.

Romantic AI takes a different approach and puts the paywall on the message itself, listing unblurred replies among its premium features. Blur as a business model is an old trick from photo apps and it works because the thing you're being sold is already on your screen.

VirtualGF, published by FutureAI Limited, goes the other way entirely and answers its own pricing question with "No, it's completely free. you can send unlimited messages." That's the whole pricing disclosure on the page. Kalon states it's built for adults and lists customisation across name, personality, tone, appearance, backstory, emotional style and relationship energy, then publishes no price at all.

Three products, three completely different levels of candour about money, and none of them wrong exactly. Just uncomparable, which I suspect is the point.

Who Is Actually Selling You This

Scroll to the bottom of an App Store listing and there's a line most people never read, the seller of record. It's the legal entity that takes your money and, if it ever came to it, the entity you'd be writing to about your data.

Across the same 24 results, four are published under what look like personal names rather than companies. Stefan Markovic. Dusan Lilic. Jayeshbhai Kavathiya. One more. That isn't disqualifying on its own, and small developers ship good software constantly, but it does mean there's no company behind the product holding your conversation history, and no compliance function to answer a deletion request.

The other twenty span a genuinely surprising spread of company forms. LLC, Ltd, Limited, Pte Ltd, LLP, Oy, SLU, and co.,ltd. all appear in one search result page. Those suffixes come from different countries' company law, which tells you these products are incorporated across at least half a dozen jurisdictions, and the jurisdiction is what determines whether you have a deletion right worth anything.

I'm not going to pretend I can rank them on that basis. I don't know where each entity is actually registered, only what its suffix implies, and implying is not knowing. What I'd say is that the seller line is one of the few facts on the whole listing that Apple verifies rather than accepts, which makes it worth thirty seconds of your attention before the screenshots get any.

One more small thing. Two of the biggest apps in the search results, EVA AI Soulmate at roughly 25,000 ratings and Replika at over 227,000, are published by companies you can look up and read about. Most of the rest are not. Scale and accountability track together here more closely than I expected.

The Pages That Won't Tell You The Price

I tried to read pricing off eight web-based products for this piece. Four of them wouldn't show a price without an account.

That's a pattern rather than a coincidence, and it's the single biggest reason the App Store listings are more useful than the marketing sites even when the app itself is worse. Apple prints every live in-app purchase with its exact price whether the developer wants you to see it or not. A website prints whatever the growth team decided this quarter.

Two of the eight returned a 403 to my requests entirely, so I've left them out rather than guess at what they charge.

If you want the pricing picture across the mainstream products with published numbers, the main AI girlfriend app breakdown has the store-listing figures laid out properly.

Questions Worth Asking First

Does the currency expire? Sometimes, and almost none of the listings say so on the store page. Check the terms before buying a large pack, because an expiring balance turns a bulk discount into a deadline.

Can I get a refund if I hate it? Apple's own media services terms say "All Transactions are final", and the refund path runs through Apple rather than the developer. That's still a better position than most web checkouts, which is a comparison I've unpacked separately for browser-based companion products.

Is a virtual girlfriend app the same thing as a girlfriend simulator game? No, and the difference is real. A game is finite content you buy once, an app is generated text you rent. There's a fuller version of that distinction in the write-up on girlfriend simulator games.

Why do two apps by the same seller have different currencies? Because the currency is a pricing instrument, not a feature. Changing it is a pricing experiment.

Where I'd Put My Attention

Ignore the number of units. Work out the dollars per thousand, which takes about a minute with a calculator and immediately tells you which pack is the trap.

Then check the last-updated date on the listing before you install anything. It's the first line in the version history and it costs nothing to read. If nobody has shipped a build in eighteen months, the product you're evaluating is a screenshot of a product.

And if the app publishes no price until you've handed over an email address, treat that as the finding rather than as an obstacle. Companies that are proud of their pricing put it on the page.