Chai AI subscription: Chai AI pricing for Premium, Ultra and the web Pro plan

How much is a Chai AI subscription?

In the app, $13.99 a month for Premium or $134.99 a year, and $29.99 a month for Ultra. Those are the four figures on the App Store's in-app purchase list that match what most reviews describe. The list also carries two items reviews never mention: a "Premium Membership" at $9.99, which is a second Premium monthly price on the same page, and an "Ultra Subscription (Weekly)" at $19.99. Chai publishes nothing that explains who sees the $9.99 item or the $13.99 one, so the honest answer is that Premium costs one of two prices and you find out which at checkout.

On the website, the numbers are different and so are the names. Chai Web Pro is $159.99 a year, or $9.99 a week, and the FAQ describes a 24-hour free trial before the annual charge. Above Pro sits CHAI MAX, sold two ways: "CHAI MAX Auto removes all rate limits and charges $0.66 per 1,000 tokens generated", and "CHAI MAX Monthly costs $90/month and doubles your rate limit with predictable billing". Both are add-ons for people already paying for Pro.

The developer's own site, chai-research.com, is where none of this lives. It links to the App Store, to Google Play, to a EULA, a safety center and a privacy policy, and it publishes revenue ($70 million a year in 2026, by its own homepage) but not a single consumer price. If you want to know what Chai costs, you have to read a store listing or the web app's FAQ, and they will each tell you about a different product.

For what the app does with what you type once you are paying, read does Chai AI train on your chats. For the feature-level comparison with Depravity, see our Chai AI alternative page.

What is the difference between Chai Premium and Ultra?

Chai does not say, on any surface we could read. The App Store list gives the names and the prices; the app description does not mention either tier; the developer website does not mention them; the EULA does not mention them. Reviews generally describe Premium as removing the free tier's message timer and the ads, and Ultra as adding access to larger models, and that matches how the two are priced, but it is a description of the app from the outside. We are not going to print a feature list the vendor has not published.

What Chai does publish is what its models are optimized for, and that is worth more than a tier comparison when you are deciding whether to pay. The research timeline on chai-research.com describes a reward model "trained directly on user signals", a technique deployed "to decrease the probability a chat session ends", and a later model that "boosted engagement by 20%". Whichever tier you buy, that is the objective the model is pursuing on the other side of the conversation.

The web product describes its own upgrade more concretely than the app does. Its FAQ says Pro unlocks "endless conversations, faster responses, and access to the most advanced AI models", with no ads, and adds a rule of thumb: "for each request a Chai Web Pro subscriber sends, the AI's response takes 8x more compute than an average app user." So the web Pro plan is positioned above the app, not beside it, which is one more reason the two price lists do not line up.

Is Chai AI free?

Yes, in both products, and in the app it stays free. The Google Play listing is marked "Contains ads" and "In-app purchases", and the Apple listing lists "Advertising" among what the app contains, so the free app is an ad-supported tier rather than a trial. Reviews on the store page complain about the ad frequency and the message timer rather than about a cutoff, which is consistent with a free plan that is limited rather than expiring. Chai is one of the few platforms in this category with a permanent free tier, and that is a real point in its favor.

The website is free to start too, and its FAQ says so directly: "Chai AI is free to start. You can chat with AI characters immediately after signing up with Google." The paid layer there begins with the 24-hour Pro trial, after which the $159.99 annual charge applies unless you cancel. A trial that converts to an annual charge is the arrangement to read twice before tapping through.

What free does not mean on Chai is private. The privacy notice, last updated July 2, 2026, states: "We use personal data derived from your in-app conversations with chatbots to enhance and fine tune the artificial intelligence models on which these chatbots operate", after removing identifiers, and sets retention at up to "five (5) years following" account deletion. That applies to free and paid users alike, and it is the single biggest difference between Chai and the platforms that commit never to train on chats.

Why does the Chai weekly plan cost more than the yearly one?

Because a week is short, and short billing periods hide the annual number. The app's Ultra weekly plan is $19.99. Kept for 52 weeks that is $1,039.48, which is $86.62 a month, against $29.99 for the same tier billed monthly. The web Pro weekly plan is $9.99, or $519.48 over a year, against $159.99 for the annual plan that buys the same features. The weekly price is displayed next to a struck-through $24.99 and a "60% OFF" label, which makes it look like the deal on the page. Over any period longer than about four months, it is the most expensive way to buy Chai.

Weekly plans are not unusual in mobile apps, and Chai is not hiding the number; it is on the list. The point is that the tier names and the billing periods are different enough that a person comparing "Chai Premium vs Ultra" can miss that the cheapest-looking line is a weekly renewal. If you decide to subscribe, the annual plans are the only ones where the effective monthly cost drops below the headline monthly price.

One more figure belongs here because it sets the ceiling. Google Play does not itemize Chai's in-app purchases; it publishes a range, and that range is "$0.99 - $899.99 per item". We could not find any Chai page that explains what an $899.99 item is, and Chai's app-side price list on Apple tops out at $134.99. We are noting the number because it is on the vendor's listing, not because we know what it buys.

We have done the same annualized math for the other paid platforms in this category on Nomi AI pricing and Janitor AI Plus price.

Who charges you, and how do you cancel a Chai AI subscription?

It depends which Chai you bought. The app plans are in-app purchases, so Apple or Google is the company on your statement, the subscription lives in your App Store or Play subscriptions screen, and cancellation and refund requests go to the store, not to Chai. Chai's EULA says as much in its warranty clause: if the app fails to conform, "You may notify the Services Store Operator, and Your Licensed Application purchase price will be refunded to You." The store operator is Apple or Google. Chai itself takes no refund obligation anywhere in that document.

The web plans are the reverse. Chai bills you directly, and its FAQ gives a plain answer to cancellation: "You can cancel your subscription at any time from your account settings. After cancelling, you keep Pro access until the end of your current billing period." That is a clearer statement than most competitors manage. What the web FAQ does not address is refunds, and the web terms, last updated February 2026, do not either.

The document you accept when you install the app deserves a separate paragraph. Chai's End User License Agreement, last updated July 28, 2026, does not contain the word "subscription", "renew" or "cancel" anywhere in its text. Section 4 is titled "No Maintenance or Support" and states that Chai "is not obligated, expressed or implied, to provide any maintenance, technical or other support for the Licensed Application." So the license governing a $29.99 a month product does not mention the product being sold on a monthly basis, and it disclaims support for it. The subscription terms you are actually bound by are Apple's and Google's.

Does a Chai app subscription work on the Chai website?

No. This is the fact most buyers do not know and the one Chai states most clearly. From the web FAQ: "Both Chai Web Pro and the Chai App are products of Chai Research Corp. They are separate platforms with no data sharing between the two." An app Premium or Ultra subscription buys nothing on chai-ai.com, a web Pro subscription buys nothing in the app, and your characters and chats do not move between them either.

The two products also confirm their common owner in different places. The chai-ai.com privacy policy names "Chai Research Corp., a Delaware-registered corporation (File Number 6527981)" at 555 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, the same address the app EULA gives. The chai-ai.com terms, dated earlier, give a different address in Newark, California. Nothing on chai-research.com links to the web app at all; its "Try Chai On" buttons go only to the App Store and Google Play. If you arrived at chai-ai.com from a search and assumed it was the app in a browser, that is the wrong assumption, and it is an easy one to make.

For a buyer, the practical rule is to decide which Chai you want before paying either. If the point is the phone app with the large character library and the free ad-supported tier, buy Premium or Ultra through the store. If the point is the web experience Chai describes as receiving eight times the compute per request, buy Pro on the site and leave the app alone. Paying for both is paying twice for two things that do not talk to each other.

How old do you have to be to use Chai AI?

Eighteen, by Chai's own rule. Section 8 of the EULA states: "Chai AI is a platform strictly restricted to users aged 18 and older", and it has you agree that you "have provided accurate age verification". The Apple listing shows an 18+ age rating on the store page, while Apple's search API still returns the older "17+" advisory for the same app, and Google Play rates it "Mature 17+". Those are the stores' labels, not Chai's rule. The rule is 18.

The same EULA is specific about content. It permits "adult-oriented content, including mature themes and fictionalized violence" as long as it stays fictional, and it prohibits, among other categories, "sexually explicit images or videos of any kind on the Chai AI platform" and any non-consensual material depicting real people. Chai is a text platform on the adult side, and it says so in the license rather than leaving it to be discovered.

We hold ourselves to the same standard. Depravity is for adults 18 and over, the hard lines are printed on every page, nothing involving minors, non-consent or illegal activity, and we do not generate images at all, so there is no image policy to read.

If age checks are the thing you are comparing, adult AI chat and which platforms verify age covers the whole market, and Character.AI age verification covers the platform that locks adults out most often.

Is Chai AI Premium worth it?

For a specific buyer, yes: someone who already uses the free app daily, wants the ads and the timer gone, and is happy with the app's models. At $134.99 a year, or $11.25 a month, Premium annual is priced below most of this market, the free tier lets you find out whether you like the product before paying, and the store handles cancellation. That is a fair deal, and the ten million installs suggest a lot of people have made it.

It is a poor deal for two other buyers. The first is anyone who signs up weekly. At $19.99 a week, Ultra costs more over a year than any monthly plan sold by any competitor we track, and the web weekly plan is not far behind. The second is anyone who cares where their conversations go. The privacy notice is explicit that conversations are used to fine tune the models and may be retained for five years after deletion, and paying does not change that clause.

The one thing we would tell every buyer to do first is decide between the app and the website, because Chai will happily sell you both. Then read the price list you are actually being shown rather than a review of it, because the list on the App Store has six items and the reviews describe two.

Chai AI or Depravity: which should you pick?

Pick Chai if the community is the point. Its library is enormous, character creation is open to everyone, the free tier is permanent, and it is a mobile app first, with a version shipping every few days. Nothing on this page competes with a character library of that size, and we are not going to claim otherwise.

Pick us if you want one product with one price list that works on every device you own. Depravity runs in any browser, phone or laptop, with plans from $15 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly, and there is no weekly option because we do not think a weekly renewal is a fair way to sell a chat product. You cancel from your own account, and the company on your statement is us.

On the things both companies put in writing, we differ most on data. Chai fine tunes on conversations and retains for up to five years after deletion. Our chats are never sold, never shared and never used to train advertising, stored encrypted, exportable and deletable on request, with automated and human review disclosed. Both of us are adults only at 18 and over, and both of us prohibit the same categories of content. The difference is what happens to the conversation after you close it.

If you are still comparing platforms, start with the best uncensored AI options, or see our pricing page for the plan and the terms in one place. For what unfiltered chat costs across the whole market, uncensored AI chat and chatbot plans has the comparison.