Character.AI vs CrushOn AI
Character.AI checked 30 August 2026 · CrushOn AI checked 30 August 2026
The short version
This one is not decided on price and pretending otherwise wastes your time. Character.AI is free, enormous, and moderated. CrushOn is unmoderated and meters your conversation by the message. Which you want follows entirely from whether the filter is the reason you are reading a comparison at all.
If it is: CrushOn is the answer, and the thing to understand before you start is that conversation is the metered resource. Their free tier is 100 message credits a month, and their paid tiers run to 125,000. Character.AI meters nothing — c.ai+ at $9.99 a month buys speed and early access, not more of anything.
If it is not: Character.AI free is one of the best products in this category and costs nothing. Its library is written by millions of people, and paying CrushOn will not get you anything like it.
Both price lists
| Plan | Per month | Buys |
|---|---|---|
| Character.AI | ||
| Character.AI, free | $0.00 | unlimitedMessages |
| c.ai+, monthly | $9.99 | unlimitedMessages |
| c.ai+, annual$94.99 a year, from $119.88 | $7.92 | unlimitedMessages |
| CrushOn AI | ||
| CrushOn Free | $0.00 | 100Messages |
| CrushOn Standard | not published | 2,000Messages |
| CrushOn Premium | not published | 6,000Messages |
| CrushOn Luxe | not published | 20,000Messages |
There is no per-unit column here, and that is deliberate: Character.AI and CrushOn AI do not sell the same countable thing, or one of them publishes an allowance and never publishes what it buys. Dividing money by that produces a confident number about nothing.
- Nobody in this table meters messages, so the per-message column would be zero on every row and is not shown. Chat is unlimited on Character.AI free, on c.ai+, and on every Luvo tier including ours.
- What the money buys is therefore the only real difference. Theirs buys speed and early access. Ours buys photographs.
- Their per-tier prices are not in this table and the rows say so. Their pricing page rendered the same $39.99 figure against every tier to a signed-out browser, which is plainly a display fault rather than the real ladder, and printing a number we could see was wrong would be worse than leaving it out.
- The credit counts are theirs and they did render distinctly: 100, 2,000, 6,000, 20,000, 55,000 and 125,000 message credits a month across the six tiers.
Character.AI free
Character.AI's free tier is the product. Unlimited conversation with a library of millions of user-made characters, no card, and a queue when the servers are busy — which is what c.ai+ sells you out of. It is the most generous free tier in this comparison set by a distance, and it is generous because conversation is cheap to serve and they are enormous.
CrushOn AI free
100 message credits a month, unlimited access to their free models, 8K memory, 200 messages of history per character, no group chat, and chat history deleted after seven days of inactivity. Luvo's free tier is unlimited chat, one girl and 10 photographs a month, and nothing is deleted for going quiet.
One meters messages, one meters nothing
Character.AI has no message limit on any tier including the free one. What c.ai+ sells for $9.99 a month, or $94.99 a year, is priority when the servers are busy, faster replies, early features and a badge. It is a queue-jumping subscription, and it is honest about that.
CrushOn sells the conversation itself. 100 message credits a month free, then a ladder of six named tiers granting 2,000, 6,000, 20,000, 55,000 and 125,000. On top of the membership sits a Pro Models chat package at $39.99 a month, or $24.99 a month on a year, which makes the better models unmetered.
We could not read CrushOn's per-tier subscription prices: their pricing page rendered the same figure against every tier to a signed-out browser, which is plainly a display fault rather than their real ladder. The credit counts rendered fine. So this page can tell you what each tier grants and not what most of them cost, which is a worse answer than we would like and a better one than a number we watched fail to load.
The seven-day line, and the age line
CrushOn's own pricing page says that on the free tier, "Chat History will be deleted after 7 days of inactivity". On the paid tiers it becomes "kept during the Membership Period" — so it is kept while you are paying. Both statements are printed before you sign up, which is more than most of this category manages, and both matter far more than a dollar.
Character.AI's constraint is the other kind. It moderates, it has tightened over time, and it is the single most-discussed thing about the platform. That is a defensible position for a general-audience product with an enormous young user base, and it is why a substantial share of people searching for alternatives to it are searching for that reason.
The two constraints are not comparable and you should not try. One is about what the product will say to you; the other is about how long it remembers you said anything.
Memory, which is where CrushOn actually wins
Set the filter aside and CrushOn's paid tiers are a serious roleplay product. Access to 16K memory models, 300 to 600 messages of history per character, auto-summary with a re-summarise control, up to 5,000 characters of pinned context per chat, group chats, concurrent chats with the same character, custom voice slots, and an adjustable message length up to 450 characters.
Character.AI does not expose any of that. It is tuned rather than configured, which is the right call for a product with tens of millions of casual users and the wrong one for somebody running a long story.
So the honest split is: casual conversation, Character.AI, free. Long-form roleplay with control over what the model remembers, CrushOn, paid.
What each one wins on
Where Character.AI wins
- Free, and the free tier is the entire product rather than a trial.
- A character library orders of magnitude larger than CrushOn's, written by millions of people over years.
- Conversation quality tuned at a scale nobody else in this comparison operates at.
- Apps on both stores, group chats, voice, and a company with real funding behind it.
Where CrushOn AI wins
- No content filter, which for a large share of readers is the entire reason to switch.
- Memory you can configure — 16K models, pinned context, re-summarise, and history limits that rise with the tier.
- A model ladder, so a heavy writer can buy their way to a better one.
- Six tiers, so the ladder actually fits people. Character.AI has one paid rung.
What we could not check
Both companies keep their checkout behind a signup. Where a number was not readable without an account it is listed here rather than taken from a review site that earns a commission on the answer.
- Character.AI: Whether c.ai+ pricing differs on mobile, where in-app purchase pricing usually carries a platform margin.
- Character.AI: Regional pricing. The figures above are the US ones.
- CrushOn AI: The per-tier subscription prices. Their page did not render them correctly to a signed-out browser and we will not print a figure we watched fail to load.
- CrushOn AI: What a message credit costs on a Pro or Ultra model, which is where the credits actually go.
- CrushOn AI: The billing descriptor.
Neither of these makes photographs of one woman who stays the same woman, which is the thing we build — our chat is free and unlimited on every tier for the same reason Character.AI's is, and we meter the pictures instead.