What a Generated Image Actually Costs on 12 AI Companion Apps

Every AI companion app publishes a monthly price. Almost none of them publish what the thing you actually came for costs. In August 2026 I bought paid accounts on twelve of them and measured it: how many credits one generated image consumes, and what those credits cost in money.

The answer is the widest spread I have found in this category. The same action costs about two cents on one app and about six dollars on another. Not two versions of the same app. The same action.

The spread does not follow the subscription price

This is the part that surprised me. You would expect the cheap apps to meter media harder and the expensive ones to be generous. It works the other way round about as often.

JustPorn.ai carries the cheapest sticker in the DreamAI SRL family, with a $2.99 seven-day trial, and charges five times more per photo than its three sibling apps running on the same backend. Two tokens on DreamGF.AI, DreamBF and eHentai AI. Ten on JustPorn.

Swipey.AI charges 19.99 euros a month, which puts it near the top of the category, and the 200 bonus Hearts that come with it cover eight photos. Then you are buying more.

SecretDesires.AI charges $7.99 on its entry tier and gives you over three hundred.

Swipey.AI cost us $23.46 at the bank after conversion, roughly three times what SecretDesires.AI charges, and produced a fortyfold difference in what you can actually make with it.

What the apps show you at the moment you spend

The credit cost is usually visible in the interface if you look for it, which is worth knowing because none of it appears on the pricing page where you make the decision.

Some vendors publish rates that are wrong about their own product

The DreamAI SRL family is an odd case. Its membership terms still quote 10 tokens per image, 3 per voice message, 7 per minute of voice call and 20 to start a new companion. The live apps charge 2, 1, 3 and 5.

The published rates are five times higher than what the software actually does. The apps are cheaper than their own documentation claims, which is a pleasant direction for an error to run in, but it means a buyer reading the terms carefully gets a worse answer than one who guesses.

We got this wrong too. An earlier version of our own pricing guide repeated the published figures and told readers a 150-token allowance covers about fifteen images a month. It covers about seventy-five. That correction is now live in the pricing traps guide.

The apps that do not meter at all

SpicyChat.AI is the outlier: no credit system at any tier, and images generated in chat carry no separate charge. That does not make it free. The subscription runs from $5 a month and you still pay it. What you do not do is pay again each time you generate something, which means the monthly price is the whole price and there is nothing further to work out.

That deserves saying because it is rare. Eleven of the twelve apps we tested run a subscription and then meter the features people subscribed for, so your real monthly cost depends on how much you use it. On SpicyChat the advertised price is what you pay, whether you generate one image or a hundred.

It is also not a blanket endorsement. Our testing found SpicyChat’s own uncensored positioning did not hold on its $24.95 top tier, and its free tier hit a context limit after about ten messages. Flat pricing is one thing the app gets right, not a verdict on the app.

How to work out your own cost in two minutes

You do not need our table. You need three numbers from inside whichever app you are considering, and you can get them before paying anything on most of them.

• What one image costs in credits. Generate one and watch the balance, or look for the cost on the generate button. It is usually displayed, just never on the pricing page.
• What the monthly plan includes. This is on the pricing page.
• The cheapest top-up pack. Divide price by credits to get the per-credit rate, then multiply by the cost of one image.

Those two figures, images included per month and marginal cost per extra image, tell you more about what an app will cost you than the subscription price does. If you plan to generate media at all, they are the numbers that decide it.

What this means if you are choosing

If media is the point of the product for you, the subscription price is close to irrelevant. Work out the per-image cost first and the monthly fee second.

If you mostly want conversation and treat images as occasional, almost any of these works, and the allowance differences stop mattering. Text chat is unmetered on most of them.

And if an app will not tell you what an action costs before you pay, that is information too. Every vendor here knows the number. Some print it on the generate button. Others make you buy first and find out afterwards.