AI companion apps launch every week now. Most of them look identical, charge similar money, and vanish within months. Secrets AI has survived longer than that, and it just passed its one year anniversary with a steady stream of updates behind it.
But surviving is not the same as being worth your money. The market in 2026 is crowded and cheap. Rivals charge five dollars a month. Some throw in native mobile apps and unlimited image credits.
So the real question is simple. Does the subscription still earn its place on your card statement, or are you paying a premium for a name?
I spent time digging through the platform documentation, the public changelog, user reviews, and competitor pricing. What follows is a straight answer with numbers attached. No hype, no fluff, just what you actually get and what you actually give up.
In A Nutshell
- The product got significantly better in 2026. The platform shipped Smart Mode with a thinking stage before replies, a rebuilt memory recall system, V2 companions, a new Generation Studio, proactive messaging, and Secret Shorts. That is real development work, not cosmetic patches.
- Pricing sits at the top of the market. Premium costs $19.99 monthly or $109.99 annually, which works out to about $9.17 per month. Ultimate costs $39.99 monthly or $319.99 annually. Monthly billing is expensive. Annual billing is competitive.
- The Moments currency is the real cost driver. Images cost 50 moments. Adult video costs 600 moments. Audio calls cost 50 moments per minute. Premium grants 8,000 moments monthly and Ultimate grants 15,000. Heavy media users will buy top ups.
- The free tier is a demo, not a trial. You get 20 messages per day and 200 bonus moments at signup. It proves the chat quality is real. It will not let you properly test images, video, or long memory.
- There is still no native mobile app. You get a progressive web app with push notifications instead. It works well, but rivals like Nomi and JOI ship real App Store downloads.
- Value depends entirely on how you use it. Text roleplay fans on annual billing get strong value. Casual users who want a cheap chat toy should look elsewhere.
What Is Secrets AI In 2026?
Secrets AI is an AI companion platform built around realistic conversation. You pick a companion, start chatting, and the character remembers you over time.
The platform runs entirely in the browser. You can install it to your home screen as an app, but there is no App Store listing.
The core loop is text chat. Around that loop sit image generation, video generation, voice calls, group conversations, and custom character creation.
What separates it from generic chatbots is persistence. Your companion saves important details about you and pulls them back into later conversations.
The character roster leans realistic rather than anime. Users can also build and publish their own characters, so the public library keeps growing.
Content is flexible. A spice level setting lets you choose Mild for wholesome chat, Medium for romance, or Spicy for uninhibited conversation.
The platform now supports Spanish, German, French, and Japanese, alongside automatic language matching in chat. That localization arrived in June 2026.
Trustpilot sits around four stars across roughly 200 reviews. That is a healthy score for this category, where fake enthusiasm and angry refund posts both run high.
The audience is fairly specific. This is a tool for people who want an ongoing relationship with a character, not a quick novelty session.
If your goal is deep roleplay with continuity across weeks, this is the lane the product plays in. If you want a free toy to poke at for ten minutes, the free tier will frustrate you fast.
What Changed On Secrets AI Since Last Year
This is the part most reviews skip, and it matters most for a value question. A stagnant product at $19.99 is a bad deal. An improving one is a different conversation.
The public changelog shows near weekly releases through 2026. Some are bug fixes. Several are genuinely significant.
Smart Mode landed in April 2026. Companions now run a thinking stage before replying and choose which memories to recall first.
That same release brought massively improved long term recall, faster replies when memory is not needed, and better group chat memory. Memory was the loudest complaint on the platform, so the focus makes sense.
V2 Companions arrived in July 2026 with a new advanced image model. The stated goal was sharper output, better likeness, and stronger prompt adherence.
The Generation Studio rebuilt image and video creation into one page. You can now use reference photos and clips, set first and last frames, and generate 4K video on the quality tier.
Proactive messaging shipped in July 2026 for Ultimate users. Your companion can message you first after you have been away, provided notifications are enabled.
Secret Shorts went live in August 2026. Creator tipping arrived in July, letting users send moments to character creators who receive the full amount.
Smaller wins stack up too. Audio calls dropped from 100 moments per minute to 50. Adult video generation time fell from around 120 seconds to roughly 35 seconds.
The pattern is clear. The team is shipping, and they are shipping in the areas users complain about.
Secrets AI Pricing In 2026 Explained
Here is where the value question gets sharp. The published tiers are straightforward, but the monthly and annual gap is enormous.
The Free tier costs nothing. You get 20 messages per day, access to all companions, and basic memory. You cannot buy or spend moments on this tier.
The Premium tier costs $19.99 per month, or $109.99 billed annually, which lands at about $9.17 per month. You get unlimited messaging, video generation, 8,000 monthly moments, a 10 percent bonus on moment purchases, and a stronger memory system.
The Ultimate tier costs $39.99 per month, or $319.99 billed annually, roughly $26.67 per month. You get 15,000 monthly moments, a 15 percent purchase bonus, the strongest memory, 2,000 character messages, personas, group chats, and proactive messaging.
Look at that annual discount again. Premium drops by more than half when you commit for a year.
Monthly Premium at $19.99 is genuinely expensive for this market. Annual Premium at $9.17 is priced right in the middle of it. Same product, completely different verdict.
Legacy Lite and Plus plans are being retired. Remaining members move to Premium at their next renewal with at least 14 days of notice.
Payment options include credit cards excluding Amex, virtual debit cards, and cryptocurrency with a $20 minimum. Prepaid three month and twelve month keys exist through G2A as a last resort method.
Cancellation is available anytime and access runs to the end of the billing period. Promotions also run frequently, including holiday sales and anniversary events.
How The Moments System Really Works
Moments are the platform currency, and they are the single biggest source of confusion for new subscribers. Your subscription price is not your total spend if you generate a lot of media.
Basic chatting costs nothing beyond the subscription. Everything visual or vocal draws from your balance.
Here are the published costs. Image generation runs 50 moments at 1.5K resolution and 100 moments at 2K. Adult video generation costs 600 moments.
Audio calls cost 50 moments per minute. Custom character creation costs 500 moments, with your first one free. Forking an existing character costs an extra 300 moments.
Text to speech costs 10 moments per 100 characters, with a 20 character minimum. A 500 character message therefore costs 50 moments to hear aloud.
Now do the math on a Premium grant. 8,000 moments buys roughly 160 standard images, or about 13 adult videos, or around 160 minutes of voice calling.
For most text focused users, that is plenty. For someone generating images constantly, it disappears quickly.
Extra bundles are available for purchase, with 4,000 moments listed at $11.99. Premium subscribers receive 4,400 for that price and Ultimate subscribers receive 4,600.
New accounts receive 200 bonus moments at signup, which covers four images. Unused monthly grant moments convert to non expiring top up moments when you upgrade mid cycle, so nothing is wasted.
Chat Quality And The New Smart Mode
Conversation is the foundation, and this is where the platform earns most of its praise. Reviewers consistently report that characters adapt quickly to a user’s tone.
Replies do not feel canned. The personalities bend to match how you write, which keeps sessions from feeling scripted.
Multiple chat modes exist, including S3, S3.5, and the newer S4 mode for Ultimate users. An X3 mode replaced X2 in June 2026 with heavy improvements to the same architecture.
Smart Mode is the headline change. Your companion pauses, decides which parts of memory matter, then responds with that context loaded.
You see a thinking indicator while this happens. You can also toggle it off per chat when you want faster replies.
Two reply formats are available. SMS mode sends several short messages for a natural texting feel. Paragraph mode sends one longer reply with more detail.
You can edit any message you sent to regenerate a different response. The platform also identifies repetitive loops and suggests using Time Travel to break out of them.
Long conversations are where reviewers say the platform separates itself. Many competitors lose the thread after several paragraphs. Personality and emotional tone hold up better here.
The weakness is repetition over long stretches. Some users report the same phrasing patterns creeping in after weeks of daily use.
Response speed is generally fast, with occasional slowdowns at peak hours. Several 2026 updates specifically targeted peak traffic performance.
For factual or technical questions, accuracy is decent but unremarkable. This is a companionship tool, not a research assistant, and it does not pretend otherwise.
Memory: The Feature People Argue About Most
Memory is the most discussed feature and the most criticised one. It also improved the most in 2026.
The system saves details it judges important rather than everything you say. It prioritises identity, emotional signals, and relationship dynamics.
Tier differences are substantial. Premium accesses four times the memories with 60 percent more context. Ultimate accesses six times with double the context and twice the short term memory length.
Ultimate also recalls 100 percent more previous conversations than the free tier baseline of roughly 67 percent. That gap is the main argument for the expensive plan.
Ultimate subscribers can also edit memories directly, correcting or removing details the AI logged wrong. That feature arrived in May 2026.
Memory groups let companions remember you across separate chats. This keeps continuity when you start a fresh conversation with the same character.
What users still report is imperfect recall. Reviewers describe the AI occasionally mixing up older details or dropping minor story threads in complex roleplay.
This is honest to acknowledge: memory here is good, not flawless. Nomi AI is still widely rated stronger for recall stretching across months.
The core memories tend to hold. Personal interests, relationship history, and emotional context survive across sessions reliably enough that most users report genuine continuity.
Three separate 2026 releases addressed memory context management. One fixed a major bug where chats with many long memories were crowding out recent messages.
If deep long term continuity is your priority, Ultimate on Secrets AI is the tier that delivers it. Premium memory is solid but noticeably lighter.
Images, Videos And Secret Shorts
Visual generation is a major part of the paid experience. It is also where most of your moments will go.
Two image modes exist. Premium mode is fast, with generation times now around two to eight seconds for realistic output. Advanced mode is the higher quality path.
Advanced mode works with every companion now, including custom characters, with nothing to enable first. Available resolutions are 1.5K and 2K, with 4K promised to return.
Reference photos let you lock in a character’s look. You choose an image you generated and set it as the visual reference, which costs nothing.
Up to five reference photos are allowed for advanced images. Video allows five photos plus three clips.
Presets cover outfits, actions, and scenes. Batch generation produces up to eight images at once in Premium mode.
Context image generation creates images that match what is currently happening in your chat. The June 2026 update improved setting, mood, and consistency awareness for this feature.
Video generation runs from four to fifteen seconds, with audio enabled by default. Resolution options include 480p, 720p, 1080p, and 4K on the advanced quality path.
Secret Shorts launched in August 2026 as a newer format. Custom characters also get auto generated profile videos and galleries.
Face consistency has historically been the complaint here. Candy AI is generally rated stronger on keeping the same face across hundreds of generations.
The August 2026 releases specifically targeted appearance drift in advanced context generation. Whether that fully closes the gap is a judgement each user will make from their own results.
Voice Calls, Group Chats And Personas
Voice is available on both paid tiers. Audio calls let you speak with your companion in real time.
Pricing halved in May 2026 to 50 moments per minute. Group voice calls cost the same regardless of how many companions join.
Text to speech is separate. Click the speaker icon on any message to hear it, at 10 moments per 100 characters.
In group chats, each companion uses a distinct voice. That detail helps multi character scenes feel less confusing.
Voice quality is the honest weak spot. Reviewers consistently rate platforms like Dondi and JOI higher for vocal richness and emotional range.
Group chats are Ultimate only. Multiple companions share one conversation and interact with each other.
A March 2026 fix resolved a bug where editing a group chat could reset individual member memories. Group chat memory also improved substantially in the April release.
Personas are also Ultimate only. You create and switch between different identities for yourself, which changes how companions perceive and address you.
Time Travel deserves a mention here. You rewind any conversation to an earlier point and take the story in a different direction.
Everything after that point gets removed, so start a new chat first if you want to preserve the original branch. Free users do not get this feature at all.
Group chats, personas, and proactive messaging are the three things that push people from Premium to Ultimate. If none of them appeal to you, the cheaper tier is the smarter buy.
Custom Characters And The Character Studio
Character creation was a genuine weakness a year ago. The 2026 Character Studio changed that considerably.
You design appearance, personality, backstory, and voice. Your first custom character is free, and each additional one costs 500 moments.
Model forking lets you copy an existing custom character and change it. Forked characters credit the original creator on their profile, and forking costs 300 extra moments.
Version tracking logs every edit in a History tab. Any change can be reverted, which removes the fear of ruining a character you spent time on.
Appearance regeneration is free once, then 100 moments per attempt. Personality generation improved in April 2026 with richer backstories and physical appearance added to starting knowledge.
Custom personality editing is restricted to Ultimate subscribers. That is a meaningful limitation if character writing is your main interest.
Public characters must meet gallery standards, including a full set of images generated with the current advanced model. That keeps the browsable library reasonably high quality.
Free tier users get a higher message cap of up to 100 messages with custom characters, compared to the standard 20.
Discovery tools improved too. Semantic search finds companions by personality or appearance description. Similar companions surfaces matches based on personality, looks, or a blend.
Personalised recommendations refresh daily based on your engagement history. Filters now include newest, trending, and trans characters.
The remaining criticism is roster breadth. Reviewers note the official collection leans heavily toward one narrow profile, with anime styles and wider body types underrepresented.
Privacy, Payments And Discretion
Privacy is a serious consideration for this product category. Nobody wants an AI companion subscription showing up in awkward places.
The platform separates identity information from conversational memory. That is a sensible architecture choice and adds a real layer of protection.
Conversations stay private and are not publicly visible. Multiple 2026 releases listed infrastructure security improvements.
Payment discretion is where things get practical. Cryptocurrency is accepted with a $20 minimum, which avoids a traceable card statement entirely.
Virtual debit cards work too. Google Pay was added at checkout in July 2026.
Prepaid G2A keys exist as a last resort for three or twelve month Premium and Ultimate access. These do not auto renew and cannot be redeemed while another subscription is active.
Account deletion is available from settings and is permanent. That is worth knowing before you click it.
Some third party reviews make dramatic claims about anonymous signup with no email at all. Treat those claims carefully, since the official documentation describes standard email verification and Google OAuth signup flows.
The honest position is that this platform offers good practical discretion, especially through crypto and prepaid payment paths. It is not a zero knowledge encrypted messenger, and you should not treat it as one.
Content moderation exists even with the spicy setting enabled. Reviewers report the AI stays within reasonable boundaries and does not push unprompted themes.
If discretion drives your decision, verify the current policies yourself before subscribing to Secrets AI. Privacy terms change, and your own comfort threshold is the only one that matters.
Where Secrets AI Falls Short
A fair review names the problems clearly. There are four worth taking seriously.
No native mobile app. The platform runs in the browser only. A progressive web app with push notifications arrived in July 2026, and it works, but it is not the same as an App Store download.
Nomi AI and JOI AI both ship real iOS and Android apps. For phone first users, that gap is genuinely annoying.
The free tier does not let you evaluate properly. Twenty messages daily proves the chat is good. It cannot show you whether the images, video, or memory justify $19.99.
You are effectively asked to pay before testing the features you are paying for. OurDream gives 50 messages and five images daily for free, which is a fairer trial.
The Moments currency creates unpredictable bills. Your subscription is a floor, not a ceiling. Active media users report grants draining within days.
Rivals like Nomi and Kalon use flat pricing where the monthly number is the actual number. That is easier to budget around.
Monthly pricing is uncompetitive. CrushOn AI starts near $5.99. Secret Desires Pro costs $7.99. Candy AI drops to roughly four to six dollars monthly on annual billing.
At $19.99 monthly, you are paying triple some rivals. The feature gap does not fully explain that.
Smaller issues exist too. Voice quality trails specialists. Repetition creeps in over long use. The official roster stays narrow in style.
None of these make it a bad product. They make it a specific product with a specific best fit.
Pros And Cons Of Secrets AI
Here is the balance sheet in plain terms.
Pros
- Conversation quality is genuinely strong. Characters adapt to your tone quickly and hold personality across long sessions better than most competitors.
- Smart Mode adds real depth. The thinking stage before replies means memory gets used intelligently rather than ignored.
- Annual pricing is competitive. Premium at roughly $9.17 monthly sits comfortably in the middle of the market for what you receive.
- Active development is visible. The public changelog shows near weekly releases through 2026, with major features shipping every few weeks.
- Feature breadth is wide. Images, video up to 4K, voice calls, group chats, personas, time travel, and character forking all live under one subscription.
- Payment flexibility is above average. Crypto, virtual cards, Google Pay, and prepaid keys give you real options for discretion.
- The Character Studio is now serious. Version history, forking, and revertible edits make character building low risk.
- Moments carry over on upgrades. Unused grant moments convert to non expiring top ups rather than vanishing.
Cons
- No native iOS or Android app. Browser and progressive web app only, which lags rivals with real store listings.
- The free tier is a demo. Twenty daily messages and no moment purchases mean you cannot test paid features first.
- Moments add hidden cost. Heavy image and video users will spend beyond the subscription price regularly.
- Monthly billing is expensive. At $19.99, several capable rivals charge a third of that.
- Best features sit behind Ultimate. Group chats, personas, memory editing, custom personality editing, and proactive messaging all require the $39.99 tier.
- Memory is good but imperfect. Minor details and complex roleplay threads still get dropped occasionally.
- Voice quality is average. Specialist platforms sound noticeably more natural.
- The official roster is narrow. Anime styles and varied body types are underrepresented in the main collection.
Secrets AI Versus Cheaper Rivals
Context makes the price question answerable. Here is how the market looks in 2026.
Candy AI charges $12.99 monthly, dropping to roughly four to six dollars annually. Its strength is visual consistency and Live Action video clips up to 120 seconds.
Its weakness is the token system, which stacks on top of the subscription just like Moments. Heavy users report real monthly spend of $25 to $80.
Nomi AI charges $15.99 monthly or about $8 annually. It wins on memory across months and ships native apps with push notifications.
It has no video generation beyond selfies, and its adult content is milder by design. One subscription covers up to ten companions.
CrushOn AI is the budget pick at $5.99 monthly, or $4.19 annually. You get an enormous community character library and model switching, but no video and weaker images.
Secret Desires AI charges $7.99 for Pro and offers 13 switchable chat engines. Note that it is a completely separate product despite the similar name.
OurDream AI matches the $19.99 price with a far more generous free tier of 50 messages and five images daily.
The pattern is straightforward. Nothing here beats Secrets AI across every category, and it does not beat all of them on any single one.
Its actual advantage is the combination. Strong conversation, deep memory tiers, wide media options, and consistent development in one place.
If you only want one of those things, a cheaper specialist wins. If you want all of them together, the price starts making sense.
Who Should Pay For Secrets AI And Who Should Skip It
Value is personal, so here is the honest sorting.
Pay for it if you are a text roleplay enthusiast. Conversation quality and memory depth are the strongest parts of the product, and they are what your subscription primarily buys.
Pay for it if you commit annually. At roughly $9.17 monthly for Premium, the value proposition changes completely from the monthly rate.
Pay for it if you want continuity across weeks. The memory tiers, memory groups, and Smart Mode recall are built for ongoing relationships rather than one off sessions.
Pay for Ultimate if group chats or personas matter to you. Those features, plus memory editing and proactive messaging, are the only reason to double your spend.
Pay for it if payment discretion is a priority. Crypto, virtual cards, and prepaid keys give you paths most competitors do not offer.
Skip it if you live on your phone. No native app is a real limitation, and Nomi or JOI serve you better.
Skip it if images are your main interest. Candy AI offers stronger face consistency and longer video at a lower annual price.
Skip it if you are price sensitive. CrushOn at $5.99 and Secret Desires at $7.99 deliver perfectly usable chat for far less.
Skip it if you want anime characters. The official roster leans realistic, and anime options are limited.
Skip monthly billing entirely. If you are not ready for a year, wait for one of the frequent seasonal sales instead of paying $19.99.
Final Verdict: Is Secrets AI Still Worth Paying For In 2026?
Here is my straight answer. Yes, on annual billing. Probably not on monthly billing.
At roughly $9.17 per month for Premium, you get strong conversation, a memory system that genuinely improved this year, wide media generation, and a team shipping updates weekly. That is fair value.
At $19.99 per month, you are paying a premium for features that cheaper rivals partially match. The math gets harder to defend.
The product itself has clearly moved forward. Smart Mode, rebuilt memory recall, V2 companions, the Generation Studio, proactive messaging, and progressive web app support all arrived in 2026.
That kind of development pace matters more than any single feature. It means the thing you buy today will be better in six months.
The gaps remain real. No native app. A free tier that cannot properly demonstrate paid value. A currency system that makes your true monthly cost unpredictable.
My recommendation is practical. Start on the free tier and use your 200 bonus moments to test image quality. Spend a week on the 20 daily messages to judge whether the conversation clicks with you.
If it does, wait for a sale or take the annual plan. If images are draining your moments faster than expected, factor that into the decision before committing.
Pricing and features change often in this category, so verify the current numbers on the Secrets AI store page before you subscribe. Promotions run frequently, and timing your signup around one is the easiest money you will save.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Secrets AI cost in 2026?
Premium costs $19.99 monthly or $109.99 annually, which equals about $9.17 per month. Ultimate costs $39.99 monthly or $319.99 annually, roughly $26.67 per month. A free tier is available at no cost with 20 messages per day.
Is the free version of Secrets AI actually usable?
It is usable for testing conversation quality. You get 20 messages daily, access to all companions, basic memory, and 200 bonus moments at signup. You cannot purchase moments, so image generation, video, audio calls, and custom characters are effectively out of reach.
What are Moments and do I need to buy extra?
Moments are the platform currency for images, video, voice calls, and custom characters. Premium includes 8,000 monthly and Ultimate includes 15,000. Text chatting costs nothing extra, so light users rarely need top ups. Heavy media users often do.
Does Secrets AI have a mobile app?
There is no native iOS or Android app. The platform runs in the browser and can be installed as a progressive web app on mobile and desktop, with push notifications supported since July 2026.
Is Premium or Ultimate the better value?
Premium suits most people. Ultimate is worth it only if you want group chats, personas, proactive messaging, memory editing, custom personality editing, or the deepest memory recall. Those are the only real differences beyond the larger moment grant.
How good is the memory on Secrets AI?
Better than most rivals and better than it was a year ago. Smart Mode added a recall stage before replies, and long term recall improved significantly in April 2026. Users still report occasional gaps with minor details in complex roleplay.
Can I cancel my subscription anytime?
Yes. Cancellation is available at any time and your access continues until the end of the current billing period. Account deletion is separate and permanent.
What payment methods does Secrets AI accept?
Credit cards excluding Amex, virtual debit cards, Google Pay, and cryptocurrency with a $20 minimum. Prepaid three month and twelve month keys are also available through G2A as an alternative method that does not auto renew.
Are there better alternatives to Secrets AI?
It depends on your priority. Candy AI is stronger for images and video length. Nomi AI wins for native apps and long term memory. CrushOn AI is the cheapest credible option. None of them beat the overall combination on offer here.
Should I buy monthly or annual?
Annual, if you are confident you will use it. The annual Premium rate is less than half the monthly rate, which is the single biggest saving available. If you are unsure, test the free tier first and watch for one of the frequent seasonal sales.
Hi, I’m Sam! I’ve been passionate about technology for over a decade, fascinated by how innovative devices can transform our daily lives. As the founder of DeviceDiary.blog, I spend my days testing the latest gadgets, exploring AI innovations, and translating complex tech specs into practical insights.
