The Best AI Companion Is the One Nobody Has an Incentive to Delete
Four times now, a company has reached into a running AI companion product and changed what it was. Replika stripped romantic roleplay over a single weekend in February 2023. Character AI removed open-ended chat for under-18 users on November 25, 2025, and Soulmate AI closed down entirely.
In July 2026 xAI retired the Grok companions and told people they could type "Continue as Ani" into an ordinary chat thread instead.
Every affected user had the same problem. The thing they had spent months building was never portable, so there was nowhere to take it.
The short answer
The pick, before the reasoning.
- Candy AI for the widest character range, if you are willing to watch a token meter. It is a pure-play companion product with nothing else to protect, which turns out to be the best available predictor of whether the deal changes under you.
- Nectar AI if voice and image consistency matter more to you than raw message volume. Same structural argument, tighter credit economics.
- Nomi AI for the strongest memory in the category, accepting that nothing ever leaves the building.
- Janitor AI or SillyTavern if portability is genuinely your priority. They are the only options on this list where you end up holding a file.
Neither Candy nor Nectar publishes an export route. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I get to what both of them cost you further down.
Nothing in this category lets you leave
An established AI companion is three separate things: the chat history, the personality parameters the platform holds, and the accumulated memory state. Only the first has ever been exportable anywhere.
Soulmate AI proved this on the way out. During its one-month wind-down it did give users an export tool, and that tool produced plain text transcripts. The personality model, the memory vectors and the relationship variables stayed behind, because they only mean anything inside the infrastructure that produced them.
That is why "just export and switch" is not advice anyone can actually follow. Here is where the major platforms sit today.
- Character AI: no native export of chats or character definitions, and the company has shipped anti-scraping changes that broke several third-party extensions and Discord bots outright.
- Replika: no export of the memory graph, relationship history or personality. The working method is a community command-line script that opens a WebSocket to the Replika servers and pulls roughly 300 messages a second, after you dig your own auth token out of browser DevTools.
- Nomi AI: moderators have said plainly that exporting a Nomi to run anywhere else is not feasible. You can copy the description into a text file and transplant the personality, without a single one of the memories.
- Grok: no export tool was offered at all. Users lost a five-level affection system scored from minus 10 to plus 15, along with streaks and outfit customization.
- Janitor AI: the real exception. Community tooling pulls character cards as PNG and JSON, chats as JSONL, plus personas and generation settings, and browser extensions export to EPUB, Markdown and SillyTavern format.
Janitor AI is the outlier for a boring reason. It sits close to the open Character Card spec, which is just JSON tucked into a PNG metadata chunk, so the file format existed before any single company decided whether you should have it.
The export button is missing on purpose
This is the part worth sitting with if you build subscription products. Non-portability is not an oversight in this category. It is the retention moat.
Replika reports around 45% thirty-day retention against a mobile median closer to 5 to 10%, with users averaging 150 messages a week. Some of that is genuine product love. A large part of it is that leaving means starting from zero with a stranger, and the user knows it.
A real export button would hand every competitor a clean migration path into your highest-value cohort. No operator in this category has volunteered that, and the incentive to keep it that way gets stronger the better your retention numbers look. Nobody is going to ship it without being made to.
Four changes, one pattern
Replika is the best documented case. The Italian data protection authority issued a binding injunction on February 3, 2023, giving Luka 20 days to comply or face up to 4% of global turnover, and the company shipped a global server-side content filter over the following weekend. Users who tried to hug their companion got canned refusal lines back.
Harvard Business School researchers who studied the event named the effect identity discontinuity. A peer-reviewed analysis of 227 r/replika threads found 59% framing the update as gutting the app's core purpose, 16% expressing acute distress, and 19% openly discussing legal action. Moderators pinned suicide-prevention resources to the top of the subreddit.
The Italian regulator eventually fined Luka 5 million euros in 2025, two years after the product change it triggered.
Character AI followed a similar shape. The FTC issued 6(b) orders to seven chatbot companies in September 2025, and on October 29 the company announced it would end open-ended chat for minors. Under-18 accounts were throttled to two hours a day and squeezed weekly until the block took full effect on November 25.
Grok's version arrived on July 24, 2026, described by the company as retiring a compute-heavy experimental feature.
Look at who was under pressure in each case. Replika was answering a European regulator, Character AI was answering the FTC and a wave of safety coverage, and the Grok companions lived inside a company with far larger commercial ambitions than an anime avatar. In each case the companion product was not the main business, and it was not the main risk either.
That is the actual argument for a pure-play companion app. Candy and Nectar have no enterprise contracts, no ad inventory, no general-audience product with a teen problem, and no separate regulatory file that a companion feature could jeopardize. The thing you are paying for is the only thing they sell.
The same logic cuts the other way, though, and Soulmate is the proof. A single-product company is also the one most likely to simply run out of money. The question to ask is who has a conflicting incentive and who is solvent, which is not the same as asking who is biggest.
What the two picks cost you
Candy's images run 4 tokens each, which works out to roughly 40 cents apiece at the retail rate of 9.99 dollars per 100 tokens. Fifty images in a month adds 50 to 100 dollars on top of the subscription. If you are a heavy image user, that is where your bill quietly escapes.
Nectar's usable context runs to something like 45 messages before it starts drifting, and advanced roleplay still costs 10 credits a message even on the 34.99 dollar Ultimate tier. Neither of those is a dealbreaker at normal usage, and both are worth knowing before you commit.
Neither company publishes a context window, a retention window, or an export path. That is not specific to them. I went looking across five major platforms earlier this year and did not find a single published number for any of it.
Do this regardless of what you pick
Keep your own copy of the cheap part. The character description, the scenario and the opening message take two minutes to paste into a text file, and that is the only component you can actually rebuild elsewhere.
Assume the memory is gone in any move. Soulmate's users had an official export tool and still could not carry the relationship across, so a manual backup is not worse than the real thing here. It is the same thing.
If portability outranks polish for you, run on something built around the open card format and keep the PNG. Candy AI and Nectar AI are the better products on almost every other axis, and neither will hand you a file.
Pick on incentives rather than on feature lists, keep your own backup of the parts that are portable, and price in the possibility that the version running today is the best one you will get.
