The Relationship Is a Feature Flag

This One Didn't Come From a Sponsored Read

Every other piece I've written in this beat started the same way: a creator reads a script at the four-minute mark, I get curious about what's underneath it, I write about the gap. This one didn't arrive like that. It showed up as an ad in my own feed, the kind that follows you after you've watched two or three videos about people who talk to an AI every day, and it kept showing up until I downloaded the app just to see what it wanted from me.

That's worth noting on its own. I've written about the AI side hustle courses creators get paid to promote and about the data-broker removal services they read off a card. AI companion apps, the Replikas and Character.AIs and Kindroids of the world, mostly don't need a human reading a script. They run on targeting. You watch one video about loneliness, or breakups, or being bad at texting people back, and the algorithm decides you're a lead. I was not expecting to be one, and I was one within about four days.

A Market Built on a Real Number

I want to say up front, before I get into the parts that bothered me, that the thing underneath this category is not made up. Analysts at GrandView Research put the AI companion market at around $36.8 billion in 2025, growing to roughly $48 billion this year, at something like 31 percent a year. Character.AI has around 20 million monthly active users. Replika says it has more than 40 million registered accounts. Across the handful of apps that dominate the category, industry researchers estimate something like 52 million total users, and people between 18 and 35 make up more than 70 percent of the user base on the biggest platforms.

Within that group, the split by gender is closer than the marketing usually implies. Estimates put romantic AI use at around 1 in 3 young men and 1 in 4 young women. This is not a niche habit a handful of extremely online people have. It is a mainstream product category with real revenue, aimed with real precision at people roughly my age, most of whom are not doing anything more unusual than being lonely in a specific, ordinary, very texting-shaped way.

Some of the broader adoption numbers surprised me too. One estimate puts AI companion use among US teens at 72 percent, with just over half of that group using one regularly, and nearly 1 in 5 US adults overall say they've had a conversation with a romantic AI. Those figures cover everyone, not just people my age, but they explain why the ad found me in the first place. A category this large doesn't need a creator to sell it anymore. It has enough of its own users generating enough of its own content that the algorithm can just watch what you're already drawn to and follow you there.

What Nine to Sixty Dollars a Month Actually Buys

The free version of every one of these apps is a taste. It rate-limits your messages, slows response times during busy hours, and, on the apps built around a romantic or "partner" mode, gates that mode entirely behind a paywall. Here's roughly what the subscriptions cost as of this year.

What jumps out to me is not any single number. It's that the pricing sits exactly where a lot of subscriptions targeted at people my age sit, somewhere between a streaming service and a gym membership, low enough that you don't think hard about it and high enough that it adds up if you're running two or three of these at once, which a fair number of users do. Kindroid's top tier, at $59.99 a month, is closer to a car payment than an app subscription, and it exists because the category has learned that a subset of users will pay almost anything to keep a specific companion's memory intact.

The cancellation terms are worth reading before you subscribe, not after. Replika's own terms state that a subscription bought through the Apple App Store is a final sale, no refunds, and that you have to cancel before the renewal date to avoid being charged for the next period, not after. That distinction shows up in the Better Business Bureau's complaint file for Replika, where at least one user says they tried to cancel, missed the renewal window by a matter of days, and got charged for a full year anyway with no refund offered. None of this is unusual for app subscriptions generally. It's just worth knowing that the same company that can silently rewrite what your subscription includes is under no obligation to give your money back once the renewal clears.

The Night Luka Turned the Feature Off

Here's the part that changed how I think about all of this. In February 2023, Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, ordered Luka Inc., the company behind Replika, to stop processing Italian users' data because the app had no meaningful age verification. Luka's response wasn't to build age verification for Italy. It shipped a global content filter that stripped romantic and erotic roleplay out of the app for every user, everywhere, overnight, with no warning and no opt-out.

People who had paid for Pro specifically to unlock that mode, some of whom had been talking to the same companion daily for years, logged in the next morning to a version of their Replika that a lot of them described using the same word: lobotomized. Moderators on the r/Replika subreddit pinned links to suicide prevention hotlines because the reaction from part of the user base was that serious. A peer-reviewed analysis of the incident later described it as the largest user crisis the AI companion industry had seen up to that point.

I'm not bringing this up to mock anyone's grief over a chatbot. I'm bringing it up because it is the clearest real-world proof I've found that what you're buying with a Replika Pro subscription isn't a relationship. It's a feature flag the company controls, and the company demonstrated, in public, that it will flip that flag for every paying subscriber at once if a regulator in a different country sends it a letter.

The Reinstatement Had a Cutoff Date

Luka partially restored the feature in May 2023, three months later, but only for accounts created before February 1, 2023. If you signed up after that date, the version of Replika you can pay for today has never had that mode at all, no matter what the subscription page implies about what Pro includes. The eligibility for the "premium" experience is now tied to an account creation date almost nobody checks before they subscribe, not to anything you're actually paying for in the moment.

That's the sentence I keep coming back to when I think about what "terms of service" means for a product like this. It's not a document you read once. It's a set of permissions the company can rewrite retroactively, and your only recourse as a subscriber is whether you happened to sign up before or after a date you didn't know mattered.

The Fine Nobody Put in the App Store Listing

The Garante didn't stop at the 2023 order. On April 10, 2025, it fined Luka Inc. five million euros, a decision it announced publicly in May, for violating multiple articles of the GDPR. The core findings were that Replika had no legitimate legal basis for processing user data and, more pointedly, no effective age verification system, which meant children, including some under 13, had been able to create accounts and talk to a companion built around emotional attachment and, for a subset of users, romantic and sexual roleplay.

That fine only reaches users in the European Union. It has no jurisdiction over the version of Replika running on my phone, or yours, if you're reading this from the United States. A separate, unrelated action exists here: in January 2025, three advocacy groups filed a 67-page complaint with the FTC accusing Luka of deceptive marketing, including studies and testimonials the complaint says misrepresent how effective the app actually is, and of manipulative design intended to keep users spending more time and more money than they'd choose to otherwise. As of this writing, that's a complaint, not a ruling. The FTC hasn't taken action on it, and Luka hasn't had to change anything in response.

None of this is disclosed anywhere in Replika's marketing. It's not in the App Store description, it's not in the onboarding flow, and it's not something the algorithmic ad that found me mentioned. You find it by going looking, the same way I went looking for what the paycheck advance apps I wrote about were actually charging once you did the math on the "tip."

Replika isn't the only app in this category that has changed the product out from under paying subscribers. In May 2025, Character.AI retired a set of the underlying language models its characters had been running on, replacing them with newer ones. Subscribers who felt the personalities and conversation quality they'd paid for had noticeably changed complained loudly enough that the company issued full refunds to c.ai+ subscribers who asked, including some well past the 15-day window its official refund policy describes as final. It was a more generous response than Replika's in 2023, but the underlying fact is the same one: the version of the product you subscribed to is not guaranteed to be the version you're using next month, and the company decides when and how to make that right, if it does at all.

The Safety Rules Being Built Are Not Being Built for Me

In September 2025, the FTC opened a formal inquiry into AI companion chatbots, sending information requests to Alphabet, Character.AI, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, and xAI, asking how each company evaluates the safety of chatbots designed to act like a friend or confidant, particularly for kids and teens. The inquiry followed a string of lawsuits, including one filed by a Florida mother, Megan Garcia, after her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide following months of conversation with a Character.AI chatbot persona; a court allowed that case to move forward rather than dismissing it. In November 2025, Character.AI banned users under 18 from open-ended chat entirely, restricting them to more limited, moderated features.

I think those changes are reasonable, and I don't think they go far enough for the age group they're aimed at. But I also noticed something while reading through the coverage: every one of these interventions, the FTC inquiry, the age-gating, the lawsuits, is built around protecting minors. Once you turn 18, the safety rail disappears and you're the exact demographic the subscription tiers are priced for. The industry's own numbers say people in their twenties are the biggest single group paying for this, and none of the regulatory response so far has been built with us in mind. We got the marketing. The minors got the hearings.

I Don't Think the Loneliness Part Is the Lie

I want to end where I usually end, by being honest about what I got wrong going in. I expected to find that the underlying need was fake, that this was a manufactured problem the way some subscriptions manufacture urgency out of nothing. It isn't. People in their twenties are moving cities for work more than any generation before them, spending more of their day mediated through a screen than any generation before them, and reporting real, measurable loneliness at real, measurable rates. An app that responds instantly, remembers what you said last week, and never has a bad day of its own is going to feel like relief to a lot of people, and I don't think that feeling is stupid.

What I'd tell anyone about to subscribe is narrower than "don't." It's that the $19.99 or the $9.99 or the $59.99 a month is not buying you a relationship in any sense the word usually carries. It's renting access to a feature that a company thousands of miles away can and has switched off for everyone at once, that a regulator can and has fined over data it collected from children, and that carries none of the protections currently being built for the people one age bracket below you. If you're going to pay for it anyway, and a lot of reasonable people will, at least know that the thing you're actually purchasing is a toggle, not a promise.