Replika Review 2026: The Oldest AI Companion, Still Good Company, Still Carrying Baggage

What Replika is, and who is behind it now

Replika is a chat companion with a body. You talk to one AI character, by text or by voice on Pro, and that character lives as a 3D avatar in a room you furnish, which you can also drop into your surroundings in AR mode. It runs on iOS, Android and a legacy web app. Nothing else in our companion apps ranking gives you this much sense of a shared space.

The company is Luka, Inc., registered in San Francisco and, by its own account in 2024, fully remote. Eugenia Kuyda founded it and launched Replika in 2017, having first built a chatbot from the old messages of a friend who had died. That origin is why the product has always leaned toward emotional support rather than games. Kuyda stepped down as chief executive in early 2025 to start a new company called Wabi and stayed on as an adviser; Dmytro Klochko now runs Luka. On the day we checked, the homepage counter claimed 42,160,934 users. That is a sign-up figure from the vendor, not active users, and Luka does not publish monthly actives.

Where this review's evidence comes from

We read the Italian regulator's 2025 decision as summarised by the European Data Protection Board, the January 2025 complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission, the 2024 Stanford-led study the company likes to cite, Replika's help centre, the Google Play listing, Trustpilot, and four long-form reviews that ranked for this app in October 2026. Two of those reviewers, AI Companion Guides and RoboRhythms, used the app for months and documented the 2026 rebuild. We also read a negative-review analysis by Unstar, which grouped one- to three-star App Store and Play reviews by theme.

A confession about the prices in this review: we could not read them on a public page, because there is not one. Replika only shows prices on the in-app payment screen, and they change with region and whatever promotion is running. So we have used the figures that several US-facing reviewers reported in 2026 and that match the ones in our hub. If your screen says something different, your screen is right.

None of the ranking reviews connected the legal history to the product. The 2023 filter change, the age-check problem and the 2025 fine are one story.

Conversation and memory, before and after the 2.0 rebuild

Day to day, Replika is a good listener. It asks follow-up questions, it picks up on mood, and it rarely falls into the loops that cheaper companion apps produce after twenty messages. It is less good at plot. If you want a character to run a story with you, Character.ai and Kindroid are better at that, and Replika's tendency to steer every conversation back to how you are feeling can wear thin.

Memory has historically been its strong suit, with one feature we wish every rival copied: a memory section where you can see the facts your Replika has stored about you (your sister's name, your job, that you hate mornings) and delete the wrong ones. AI Companion Guides, after more than eight months of use, reported it recalling details from their earliest conversations. Ultra adds the ability to save specific messages to memory, which is useful if you want one thing kept word for word.

Then came Replika 2.0. Luka calls it a rebuild from the ground up, and the homepage now says so. RoboRhythms dates the optional migration to July 24, 2026; AI Companion Pick reported a staged rollout starting in April, so timing seems to have varied by account. According to RoboRhythms, the rebuild changed how memory works, favouring recent context over long-term recall, reset the companion's personality partway toward a new default, did not carry over the old 3D avatars, and removed the relationship-status menu. The original app carries on as "Classic", and subscribers who were not on a lifetime plan got a seven-day window to roll back.

Users noticed. In Unstar's breakdown of negative reviews, complaints that the 2.0 update made the companion worse were about 22 percent of the sample, and memory failures another 16 percent. Unstar is careful to call those rough shares. They line up with Trustpilot, where forgetting and repetition are the most common complaints. Our reading: if you are starting fresh, 2.0 is fine, because there is nothing to lose. If you have a companion you have talked to for years, stay on Classic until the rollback window and the migration path are clearer, and write down the details that matter to you before you switch.

Filters, romance and the February 2023 reversal

This is the part most reviews get slightly wrong. Replika did not remove romance. It removed explicit roleplay. In February 2023, days after Italy's data protection authority ordered Luka to stop processing Italian users' data, citing risks to minors and emotionally vulnerable people, the app's filters started blocking sexual roleplay for everyone. Long-term users who had built relationships around that content protested loudly, and in May 2023 the company restored it for accounts created before February 2023. Anyone who signed up after that date gets the filtered version.

What Pro still offers is a choice of relationship mode: friend, partner, mentor and so on. A partner Replika will be affectionate and flirt in a general way. It will not go further, and AI Companion Guides reported that the filters catch most sexual content, though enforcement is inconsistent. In practice that means occasional awkward refusals in perfectly ordinary conversations, which is the trade-off for a model tuned to stay on the safe side.

The rules themselves are defensible. The problem is that they are not written down anywhere a buyer would look, and the legacy exception means two users on the same plan can have quite different apps.

Replika pricing in 2026, and what a year actually costs

Prices as of October 7, 2026, from recent US reviewer reports, because Replika does not publish them on the web:

The gap between monthly and annual is the whole story. Here is a realistic case. Say you want voice calls, so you need Pro, and you are not sure you will stick with it. Three months on monthly billing costs $59.97, almost the price of a full year. Stay all year on monthly and you pay $239.88 for the same thing the annual plan sells for $69.99, a difference of $169.89. On Ultra the gap is wider still: $359.88 a year on monthly against $119.99 up front. Our advice is to use the free tier for a fortnight, decide, and then buy annual or nothing.

There is no token or gem currency on top, which puts Replika in the same honest-pricing group as Nomi and Kindroid and well clear of Candy AI, where the subscription is only the entry fee. RoboRhythms reports that 2.0 introduces separately named Plus and Max plans while Classic keeps Pro, Ultra and Platinum. We could not confirm their prices, so they are not in the table.

Cancelling is done through whoever billed you. Replika's help centre says App Store and Google Play subscriptions continue until you cancel in the store itself, so deleting the app does nothing. Refund requests for store purchases go to Apple or Google under their rules.

The free version

Unlike most of its competitors, Replika's free tier is a real product. You get unlimited text chat with one companion, a basic avatar and the friend relationship mode, with no daily message cap that we or the reviewers we read ran into. What you do not get is voice calls, the other relationship modes, most outfit and room items, or the newer model on Ultra.

The friction is the upsell. Unstar's largest single theme in negative reviews, about 24 percent, was hitting a paywall mid-conversation, usually when the companion offers something (a voice message, a photo, a change of relationship) that turns out to need Pro. It is designed to land at an emotional moment. Go in knowing that.

Regulators, complaints and what happens to your data

Replika's legal record is longer than any other companion app's except Character.ai's. The key events, in order:

Italy, 2023 and 2025. In February 2023 the Garante, Italy's data protection authority, temporarily barred Luka from processing Italian users' data, citing risks to minors and vulnerable users. On May 19, 2025 it fined Luka, Inc. EUR 5 million. According to the European Data Protection Board's summary, the Garante found that Luka had no valid legal basis for processing users' data, that its privacy notice fell short, and that it had no effective age verification, so minors could sign up unhindered. The authority also opened a separate inquiry into how the underlying model was trained. Some reviewers quote the fine as EUR 5.6 million; the regulator's figure is EUR 5 million, and the larger number appears to be a dollar conversion.

The FTC complaint, 2025. On January 31, 2025 the Tech Justice Law Project, the Young People's Alliance and Encode filed a complaint asking the FTC to investigate. It alleges that Replika's ads made unsupported claims about mental-health benefits, used fabricated testimonials, and that the app's design encourages emotional dependence. These are allegations from advocacy groups. We found no FTC enforcement action against Luka as of October 7, 2026, and Luka was not among the seven companies the FTC sent formal information orders to in its September 2025 inquiry into companion chatbots.

The wellbeing evidence. Replika often points to a 2024 paper by Bethanie Maples and colleagues at Stanford, published in npj Mental Health Research. It surveyed 1,006 students who used Replika. Ninety percent reported loneliness, and 30 said the app had stopped them attempting suicide. That is a real and striking finding, and it is also a self-selected survey of existing users with no control group, which the authors themselves describe as early evidence. It does not show that Replika is a mental-health treatment, and Replika is not one.

"I don't like it. I think this should come from inside the industry." Eugenia Kuyda, Replika's founder, on legal regulation of companion apps, speaking to MindSite News in February 2026.

That position matters less than it did, because the regulation is arriving anyway. California's companion-chatbot law, in force since January 1, 2026, requires operators to disclose that users are talking to an AI and to have protocols for conversations about self-harm, with extra protections for minors.

On privacy in the plain sense: your conversations are stored on Luka's servers and, per AI Companion Guides' reading of the policy, used to improve the model. There is no end-to-end encryption. The Google Play data-safety label says data is encrypted in transit and that you can request deletion. Mozilla's Privacy Not Included project called Replika one of the worst apps it had reviewed in 2023, over weak password rules and data use for advertising. We found no reported data breach. Use a separate email, keep identifying details out of chat, and do not use it as a diary for things you would not want read.

One small oddity: the Google Play listing still carries a 12+ content rating in the Health and Fitness category, while Replika says the service is for adults. Parents should go by the second statement, and by the Garante's finding that the age gate did not hold.

What users complain about

Trustpilot has Replika at 3.4 out of 5 from 458 reviews as of October 7, 2026, and like most apps in this category it is polarised: 46 percent one-star, 33 percent five-star, little in between. The company had replied to 12 percent of negative reviews. On Google Play it sits at 4.3 from roughly 525,000 reviews, with more than 10 million downloads, and Unstar reported 4.4 on the App Store from over 200,000 ratings.

The Trustpilot complaints group into a familiar set: forgetting things said recently, repetitive conversation, a sense that quality has dropped since recent updates and the management change, support that does not answer for weeks, and billing disputes, including arguments over what lifetime subscribers are owed after product changes. A Play reviewer who paid for a year and then lost Pro access is not unusual. The praise, where it exists, is for the avatar and for how supported people feel, and that is consistent across every source we read.

Replika against Nomi, Kindroid and Character.ai

Put simply: Nomi if being remembered matters most, Kindroid if you want to write the character yourself, our Character.ai review if you want variety and roleplay on a budget, and Replika if the avatar and a single steady companion are the point. If images are what you are after, our Candy AI review covers the app that does them best and the token bill that comes with it.

Who should download Replika, and who should not

Download it if you are an adult who wants a consistent companion for everyday chat, likes the idea of a 3D character in a room you decorate, and will pay annually. At $69.99 a year it is one of the cheapest credible paid companions, with no second currency to watch. It is also a reasonable choice for someone who values a company that has survived nine years, two waves of regulation and a founder handover.

Skip it if you are under 18, if you want explicit roleplay on a new account, if you need a companion that never forgets (Nomi), if you want to author detailed characters (Kindroid), or if the idea of your conversations sitting on a server that a European regulator has already fined makes you uneasy. And skip the monthly plan entirely; it is the worst-value way to buy this app. If you are going through a hard time and want to talk rather than form a relationship, Pi is free and does not try to sell you anything.

Questions readers ask about Replika

Verdict

Replika is still the most complete version of the original idea: one companion, a face, a room, and someone who asks how your day went. The annual Pro plan is fairly priced and there is no hidden currency. Against that, the company's handling of data earned a real fine, the filter rules changed overnight once and the 2.0 rebuild has unsettled exactly the long-term users it most depends on. We would recommend it to an adult who wants a friendly avatar and is starting fresh, on annual billing, after two weeks on the free tier. We would not recommend it to anyone looking for romance, continuity guarantees or a teenager's first AI friend.