"Unlimited" means the text

The second currency, by name

Five products, five vocabularies for the same mechanism.

Two rows on that table are worth stopping on.

Infatuated charges a token per message sent. Not per image, per message. The plans page states it plainly. That makes it the one product here where the phrase “unlimited messages” could not be written at all, and to its credit it is not.

SpicyChat has no second currency whatsoever. No credits, no coins, no top-up packs — the subscription page lists three plans and nothing else. Features come with the tier rather than being paid for out of a balance. Whatever else is true about SpicyChat, $5.00 a month means $5.00 a month, and it is the only figure in the category you can take at face value without arithmetic.

What things actually cost

Take Candy AI, which is the clearest case because its structure is typical and its numbers are known.

The subscription includes 100 tokens a month. Text chat does not consume them. Everything else does:

A hundred tokens sounds generous until you price it out. Thirty images is a hundred tokens. That is one image a day, and nothing else — no voice, no video, no new characters. Anyone using the features the product advertises will exhaust the monthly allowance in the first week and be buying top-ups by the second.

That is not a hidden cost, exactly. It is a visible cost placed one click away from the number people quote when they recommend the app.

Three things the pricing page will not tell you

Unused balance does not carry over. Both Infatuated and CrushOn reset the monthly pool rather than accumulating it. Buy an annual plan on CrushOn and you do not get a year's credits up front — you get a monthly allocation, twelve times, and whatever you did not spend in March is gone in April. The annual discount buys a lower price, not a bigger bucket.

Some top-up prices are not published at all. CrushOn's bonus message packs are the clearest example: the FAQ names the pack sizes, the minimum order is a hundred messages, subscribers get a discount — and the dollar figure appears nowhere on the pricing page, nowhere in the FAQ, and in none of the third-party reviews we checked. It is visible only inside the account, after you have paid to get in.

The documents sometimes disagree with each other. On Infatuated, the plans page says a message costs one token while the terms of service say two. Both are official. Neither is a typo you can resolve from outside, and a factor of two on the only metered action in the product is not a rounding error.

When a provider will not publish the price of the thing you will inevitably need to buy, that silence is a fact about the product, and one we record on the review page for that product alongside the numbers that are published.

The other trick, which is simpler

Separate from the second currency, there is a straightforward presentation habit worth naming.

Nearly every provider advertises the annual rate divided by twelve as the headline price. A subscription that costs $13.99 a month appears on the front page as “from $3.99”, with the actual arrangement — pay $47.88 once, today, for a year — findable but not prominent.

Both numbers are true. Only one of them is what leaves your account this month.

We always publish the month-to-month figure and say so when a number had to be reconstructed, because on at least one product in this category the monthly rate is not printed anywhere and has to be derived from a struck-through figure. That rule, and the rest of how we handle prices, is on the methodology page.

How to work out the real number in five minutes

Before subscribing to anything here, do this arithmetic. It is not difficult and it is the difference between a $10 month and a $40 one.

1. Write down the month-to-month price. Not the annual rate divided by twelve. The number that will be charged in thirty days.
2. Find out whether text costs anything. On four of five products it does not. On one, every message does.
3. Count what you will actually generate in a week. Be honest — images if you want images, minutes of voice if you want voice.
4. Multiply by four and price it in the second currency. Compare against what the subscription includes.
5. Find the top-up price. If you cannot find it before paying, treat that as the answer to a different question.

For most people the result is between two and three times the advertised monthly figure, and the gap is entirely in step four.

Why the structure exists

It would be easy to read this as deception, and in places it is. But the mechanism has a mundane cause worth understanding, because it tells you which products will change their pricing next.

Text is cheap to serve. Images, voice and video are not — they cost real compute per generation, and the cost does not fall much with scale. A flat subscription with genuinely unlimited image generation would either be priced at a level nobody pays, or would lose money on exactly the customers who use it most.

So the industry converged on the same solution at roughly the same time: sell the cheap thing as unlimited, meter the expensive thing. The second currency arrived across the category in about a year, which is not what coordinated pricing looks like — it is what happens when a dozen companies hit the same wall in the same quarter.

Knowing that, you can predict the direction of travel. Anything that becomes cheap to serve gets folded into the subscription; anything that gets more expensive gets metered. Voice messages were metered on some products and are now included on others. Video, currently the most expensive thing any of them do, is metered everywhere.

What this means for comparing products

The headline price is not a comparison. Two services at $13.99 can differ by thirty dollars a month in practice, depending on what the subscription includes and what it does not.

What is comparable:

• Whether text is metered. A yes/no question with a real answer.
• What the included allowance actually buys, converted into images or minutes rather than left as a token count.
• Whether unused balance rolls over. Usually no, occasionally yes, always worth checking.
• Whether the top-up price is published before you pay.

Our ranking of The Best AI Girlfriend Apps of 2026 uses the month-to-month price and states the second currency separately for each product, because averaging them into one number would hide the exact thing this article is about.

If the question is narrower — how far you can get without paying at all — that is a different comparison, and the free tier limits are where the daily message counts and image allowances sit side by side. A free tier and a metered subscription fail in different ways, and it is worth knowing which one you are about to run into.

And if a service changes its structure while you are using it, which happens more than the category admits, what to do about it is its own subject.

The short version

“Unlimited” in this category means: unlimited text, on four of the five products that use the word. Everything visual is metered, the meter resets monthly without carrying over, and on at least one product the price of refilling it is not published anywhere you can read before paying.

None of which makes these services a bad deal. It makes the advertised price a starting figure rather than a total — and the only number worth comparing is the one you calculate yourself.