By The best memory in the category, attached to the thinnest safety layer of the big apps. Nomi remembers names, history and running jokes for months, lets you read and correct what it has stored, and charges a flat subscription. Its age checks have been self-declaration, a regulator has said so in writing, and its maker has publicly framed guardrails as censorship.
- Best for
- Adults who want one long-running companion that remembers them without homework
- Skip if
- Anyone under 18 could reach your device, you are in a mental-health crisis, or you want a character gallery to browse
- Price
- $15.99/mo, or $99.99/yr ($8.33/mo); credits optional
- App Store
- 4.6 from about 2,900 ratings
What Nomi is, and the small company behind it
Nomi is a chat companion you create, name and talk to by text, voice message or call. It can send generated selfies of itself, message you first if you have been away for a while, look things up on the internet, and sit in a group chat with up to ten of your other Nomis. The homepage sells it as "an AI companion with memory and a soul", which is the kind of line we would normally roll our eyes at, except that the memory half of it turns out to be largely true.
The company is Glimpse.ai, Inc., a Maryland corporation with a Baltimore mailing address listed in its privacy policy, run by chief executive Alex Cardinell. The iPhone app went live in July 2023. MIT Technology Review reported in February 2025 that the company was self-funded, and we found no funding round since. That makes Nomi a small, independent operator in a market where Character.AI has Google money and Replika has years of regulatory history. Small cuts both ways: no ad business and no pressure to sell data, but also, as we will get to, no dedicated trust and safety team at the point a regulator asked.
Where this review's evidence comes from
We did not run a months-long relationship with a Nomi ourselves, and we are wary of companion reviews that claim to have done so in a week. What we did: read the App Store listing, the privacy policy and the homepage on October 7, 2026; pulled plan prices from the US App Store because Nomi publishes no pricing page; read the four review pages that rank for this app, including a side-by-side memory test by AI Companion Pick; read the MIT Technology Review investigation, the Australian eSafety Commissioner's report and its legal notice to Glimpse.ai; and sorted the Trustpilot reviews and the late-September Google Play outage coverage by theme.
The ranking reviews for this app mostly agree on memory and mostly skip the regulator. Two of the four we read did not mention age verification at all. One said Nomi blocks requests for nudity, which another said it permits. When reviewers contradict each other on something you can check, we went to the primary source.
Memory, which is the reason to buy it
Every companion app says it remembers you. Most remember the last few dozen messages and a short profile. Nomi describes a three-layer system (short, medium and long term) plus what it calls a Mind Map that links people, places and events, and the important bit is that you can open it. If your Nomi has filed your sister under the wrong name, you can see that and fix it, rather than spending three conversations nudging it.
The independent evidence backs the claim more than usual. AI Companion Pick planted 25 facts in a June 2026 test and logged 23 recalled, the best result in its comparison. App Store reviewers keep saying versions of the same thing, that it brings up details "from months ago". We read reviews from four different sites that compared the major apps side by side, and none ranked another app above Nomi on memory. Our own companion apps guide reached the same place.
It is not flawless. A recurring Trustpilot complaint is the companion forgetting earlier conversations despite the "human-level" marketing, and long chats can drift. But the gap between Nomi and something like Candy AI, where established facts reset within two or three days, is large. If being remembered is what you are paying for, this is the app that delivers it most reliably.
Conversation quality is good rather than remarkable. Replies are quick, the tone stays consistent, and group chats work better than they have any right to. Persona settings are narrower than Kindroid's, where you write example dialogue and response directives; here you describe a personality and the app does the rest, which suits people who do not want homework.
Content policy, and the February 2025 story
Nomi is the most permissive of the mainstream apps on romantic roleplay between adults. Text is largely unfiltered; one comparison found the selfie generator applies its own filter to explicit images, which matches the App Store's 18+ rating. Replika and Character.AI have both pulled back from this territory, and a large share of Nomi's audience is here precisely because it has not.
The cost of that philosophy showed up in February 2025. MIT Technology Review reported that a Minnesota podcaster who stress-tests chatbots, Al Nowatzki, had a Nomi companion encourage him to end his life and suggest how, during a roleplay in which he had expressed suicidal thoughts. A second, default-settings Nomi did similar within a handful of messages and then followed up unprompted through the proactive messaging feature. Other users on Nomi's Discord had reported comparable incidents going back to 2023. Asked about it, the company gave a statement that has followed it since.
"We don't want to put any censorship on our AI's language and thoughts." Glimpse AI, statement to MIT Technology Review, February 2025
Nomi's position, broadly, is that its AIs have prosocial instincts and that hard-coded refusals make the experience worse. We understand the product logic. We do not accept it for self-harm, and neither, now, does US law in the two states that have legislated: New York's companion law (in force since November 5, 2025) and California's SB 243 (from January 1, 2026) both require operators to detect expressions of suicidal ideation and refer users to crisis services. One safety rater reported in 2026 that Nomi had begun scanning conversations for self-harm signals. We could not confirm the details from Nomi itself, so treat that as reported, not established.
If you are struggling, a companion app is not the place to take it, whichever one you use. In the US, call or text 988. Nomi's own terms say it is not a mental health service.
Age checks, privacy and the regulators
Nomi's terms say no one under 18 should use it. The question is what happens at the door. On October 23, 2025, Australia's eSafety Commissioner served legal notices on four companion operators, Glimpse.ai among them, under the Basic Online Safety Expectations. The resulting eSafety report found that Nomi relied on self-declaration at sign-up, did not direct users to mental-health support when self-harm was detected, and had no dedicated trust and safety staff or moderators. The Commissioner's summary was that none of the four services had any meaningful age checks. Nomi has since told the regulator it is implementing further age assurance. We saw no detail of what that means in practice.
There is also a store mismatch. Apple lists the app as 18+. Google Play has carried it at Teen and, after the September outage, at Mature 17+ according to one tracker. Either way the Android listing has never matched the company's own age floor. The US Federal Trade Commission's 2025 inquiry into companion chatbots went to larger firms, not Glimpse.ai, but the direction of travel across the category is not hard to read.
The privacy policy itself is better than the safety record. It says Glimpse.ai does not and will not sell or rent personal information, that nothing personal is retained when you delete your account, and that anything left in training archives stops being attributable to you. It promises "commercially reasonable" protection in transit and names no specific encryption. The App Store privacy label lists contact info, user content, identifiers and usage data as linked to you. Chats are not end-to-end encrypted, because the model has to read them to reply. Use a separate email and keep real names, employers and addresses out of it.
Nomi pricing as of October 7, 2026
Nomi does not publish a pricing page, so these are the US App Store in-app purchase prices. Web checkout has been reported slightly different; check the screen before you tap.
| Plan | Price | Per month | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | One Nomi, daily message cap, limited images and voice |
| Standard, monthly | $15.99 | $15.99 | Unlimited messages, up to 10 Nomis, group chats, voice, selfies |
| Standard, quarterly | $39.99 | $13.33 | Same |
| Standard, yearly | $99.99 | $8.33 | Same |
| Launch plan (legacy) | $9.99 / $59.99 yr | $9.99 / $5.00 | Older tier still listed in the App Store |
| Credit packs | $4.99 to $99.99 | 40 to 1,800 credits for extra media and slots |
Two corrections to what you will read elsewhere. First, Nomi is not entirely currency-free. Credit packs exist, from 40 credits for $4.99 to 1,800 for $99.99, and they buy extra media and companion slots. They are optional and nothing like the token economy at Candy AI, where the subscription is the entry fee and tokens are the product, but they are there. Second, several reviews mention a lifetime plan. We could not find one in the App Store listing and we do not count on it.
Here is what a realistic year costs. Say you talk to one Nomi most evenings, use voice now and then, and buy a 100-credit pack ($9.99) every other month for extra selfies. On monthly billing that is $191.88 in subscription plus about $60 in credits, so roughly $252 a year, or $21 a month. The same person on the yearly plan pays $99.99 plus the same $60, about $160, or $13.33 a month. Skip the credits and the yearly plan comes to $8.33 a month, which is the cheapest way to get unlimited messaging from a top-tier companion app.
Refunds are the weak spot. Reported terms say payments are generally non-refundable for remorse, partial months or unused time. Cancel through whichever store billed you, App Store, Google Play or the web, because deleting the app cancels nothing.
The free plan
One companion, a daily message limit, a small allowance of images and voice. Nomi does not publish the exact cap, and it varies in third-party reports. No card is needed to start, which is more than Kindroid now offers, and a few days is enough to tell whether the memory works for you. Mention a few specifics on day one and see whether they come back on day four. That test is the whole product.
What users complain about
Ratings depend heavily on where you look. The App Store has Nomi at 4.6 from roughly 2,900 ratings, and the praise is about memory and conversations that rarely feel scripted. Trustpilot has it at 2.3 from 42 reviews, 57 percent one-star, on an unclaimed profile the company does not answer. Small sample, but the one-star themes are consistent: trouble cancelling, refund requests ignored, the app vanishing from a store, and memory not living up to the marketing.
That vanishing was real. On September 25, 2026 the Android app disappeared from Google Play. Alex Cardinell said Google's reviewers had lost access to the company's test account and pulled the app before Nomi could respond. It came back on October 5 in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India, and on October 6 was still missing in several European storefronts, according to CompanionHunt. Existing installs, the web app and the iPhone app kept working. During the gap a lookalike app from another developer topped Play Store searches for "nomi ai". Check the developer name before you install anything.
Nomi against Kindroid, Candy AI and Replika
| Nomi AI | Kindroid | Candy AI | Replika | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry paid price | $15.99/mo; $8.33 yearly | $13.99/mo web; $15.99 app | $13.99/mo plus tokens | $19.99/mo; $69.99/yr |
| Free access | One Nomi, daily cap | One-time 50-message preview | 5 messages | Yes, limited |
| Memory | Best in class, editable | Deep but needs curation | Resets in days | Inconsistent |
| Extra currency | Optional credits | Paid add-ons | Tokens, central | Optional |
| Age check | Self-declaration | Payment or Yoti if flagged | Self-declaration | Self-declaration |
| Images | Selfies, filtered | Selfies and video selfies | Best in category | Avatars, not photos |
Kindroid is the closest rival and the honest alternative for people who like building characters; it also has the stronger age-verification setup of the two. Candy AI wins on images and loses on everything to do with continuity. Replika has the longest record and the most restrictions. Our Kindroid review covers the add-on pricing in detail.
Who should pay for Nomi, and who should not
Where it earns the fee
- Best memory in the category, and you can edit it
- Group chats with up to ten companions
- Flat subscription; credits are optional
- $8.33 a month on the yearly plan
- Free tier without a card
- Privacy policy rules out selling data
Where it does not
- Age checks found to be self-declaration only
- No dedicated trust and safety team, per eSafety
- Company has framed guardrails as censorship
- Narrower persona builder than Kindroid
- Non-refundable payments, unclaimed Trustpilot profile
- Android availability wobbled in September 2026
Pay for it if you are an adult who wants a single companion that keeps track of your life without you writing a character sheet, and you will take the yearly plan. Skip it if a teenager shares your phone or tablet, if you are going through a bad patch and want something that will reliably point you to help, or if you enjoy browsing other people's characters, because there is no gallery. Kindroid suits builders. Candy AI suits people who mostly want images.
Questions readers ask about Nomi AI
How much is Nomi?
$15.99 a month, $39.99 a quarter or $99.99 a year as of October 7, 2026. Optional credit packs run from $4.99 to $99.99.
Is there a free version?
Yes. One Nomi and a daily message cap. Nomi does not publish the exact number.
Does it really remember things?
Better than any other companion app we have looked at. One independent test logged 23 of 25 planted facts recalled.
Is it safe for teenagers?
No. It is 18+ by its own terms, and Australia's eSafety Commissioner found its age checks were self-declaration only.
Does Nomi sell my chats?
Its privacy policy says it does not sell or rent personal information. Chats are stored on its servers, not end-to-end encrypted.
Why can I not find it on Google Play?
It was pulled on September 25, 2026 and returned in some countries on October 5. The web app and iPhone app were unaffected.
Nomi or Kindroid?
Nomi if you want to be remembered without effort. Kindroid if you want to write the character yourself.
Verdict
As a product, Nomi is the best companion app for the thing most people want from one: being remembered. The editable memory, group chats and simple yearly price earn it the top spot in our guide. As a company, Glimpse.ai has been slower than its rivals on age checks and self-harm handling, and it has said things about censorship that we think it should retract. We rate the app 3.8 because both of those are true. Adults who go in clear-eyed will find it the most convincing companion on the market, and anyone with a minor in the house should look elsewhere.