Chai is a phone app built around a feed of community made bots, and the feed is the point of it. Private Crush is a browser tab with 125 written companions, no app to install and nothing to build first. This page runs both on the cast, the memory, the images and the price, and says where Chai wins.
Choose Private Crush if you want to open a browser tab, read a few profiles properly and talk to somebody who already has a history, a job and a way of arguing. There are 125 companions here, every one of them written before you arrived, and none of them needs setting up before the first message. Conversations are saved and resume where you left them, pictures can be generated inside the chat, and five messages a month cost nothing, which is enough to hear how somebody writes before you decide anything at all. Nothing about the first visit asks you to configure anybody.
Choose Chai if you want an app on your phone with a feed of community made bots and the freedom to make one yourself and publish it. That is real and this does not have it. There is no native app here, nothing to install from a store, and no way to build a companion of your own from scratch, however much you would like one. If moving through a stream of new things is the part of this you enjoy, Chai is built for exactly that and a fixed cast of 125 is not. That is a fair reason to choose it, and nothing further down this page will argue you out of it.
| Feature | Private Crush | Chai |
|---|---|---|
| Companions ready to talk to on the first visit | Yes | Yes |
| You can read who somebody is before you start talking | Yes | Yes |
| A native app you install from a store | No | Yes |
| Something to try before paying anything | Yes | Yes |
| Conversations still there when you come back | Yes | Yes |
| Every companion written by the team behind the product | Yes | No |
| Building a companion of your own from scratch | No | Yes |
| Images generated inside the conversation | In the chat itself | Arranged around text conversation |
| Who can read your conversations | Only you, by database rule | Set out in their privacy policy |
| Adult conversation on the account | Allowed here | Set by their own content rules |
| What paying looks like | One price, no top ups | A subscription, priced on their site |
Private Crush wins 2 of these 11 rows, ties 7 and loses 2. They are rows we picked, so read them that way. Every line was checked against Chai's own public pages, and the sections below say plainly where Chai is the better answer, which on a comparison with a mobile first product is more often than not.
Without paying anything here you get an account, the whole catalogue of 125 companions to read through, and five messages a month. Five is not many and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. It is enough to open a profile, start a conversation and hear how somebody writes, which is the only thing that tells you whether a written companion reads like a person to you or like a chatbot wearing a costume. If the writing does not land in five messages it will not land in five hundred, and you will have spent nothing at all finding that out, which is the point of a free tier this small.
Chai's free side is a different shape because the product is a different shape. It is an app you install, and the feed of community made bots is open to you from the first minute, so the free experience over there is browsing rather than a small budget of messages. That suits what it is built for. A feed only works if you can move through it, and a product that metered browsing the way this one meters messages would not be worth the space on a phone. Their own site is the place to read what their free tier covers today, and it is the only source worth trusting for a figure that moves.
The two free tiers answer different questions, and it is worth knowing which question you are asking before you spend an evening on either of them. Theirs answers whether you enjoy moving through a stream of bots looking for one that catches you. Ours answers whether one written companion holds up in conversation past the opening exchange. Neither answer transfers to the other product. If you can spare twenty minutes, try both free sides in the same week and notice which one you reopen the following day without being reminded to. That is a better test than any table on any page.
Private Crush costs $20 a month, $24 a quarter or $60 a year, which works out at $5 a month billed yearly. What that buys is unlimited messages instead of five a month. There is no balance to top up, no message packs and no charge per picture, so the amount you pay in January is the amount you pay in June whether you send twenty messages or two thousand of them. Pay for one month, decide it is not for you, and nothing about the account changes afterwards except that the free limit comes back. The conversations you have already had stay exactly where they are.
One caveat belongs here, said plainly rather than implied as a list of separate things a plan opens up. Only the message limit is actually gated by the plan. Image generation inside the conversation is built for every signed in caller, with no subscription check in the code that runs it, so a free account that still has messages left can ask for a picture and get one. Paying removes the limit on messages, and that is the whole of what paying does. Anybody describing four separate paid features here is describing a product that does not exist. Saying it plainly beats a list that overclaims.
What paying changes on Chai's side is documented on Chai's site, and this page will not repeat it. Tier contents move, a wrong figure written here would outlive its correction by years, and a comparison page quoting somebody else's numbers is the least reliable sentence on it. The rule followed here is simple. Our own figures come from the same file the checkout reads, so they are the ones you will actually be charged, and anything about theirs should be read where they publish it, on the day you are deciding. Nothing else on this page depends on knowing what they charge.
There are 125 companions here and every one of them was written before you arrived. Each has a history, a way of talking, things she cares about and things she will not be talked into, and you can read all of that before sending a single message. All 125 are women. There are no male companions and no way to add one. You cannot build a companion here either, from scratch or otherwise, and that is the design of the product rather than a feature waiting to be added later. You pick somebody out of a cast. You do not commission her. That is narrower in one direction and fuller in another.
Chai is arranged the other way round. Anyone can make a bot and publish it, which is why the catalogue over there is enormous and why it varies as much as it does. Some community bots are written with real care by somebody who wanted a particular character to exist in the world. Others are two lines and a name. That variance is not a flaw in the product, it is what an open catalogue looks like everywhere, and the interface is built so you can move past the ones that do not hold you quickly enough for it to matter. An open catalogue is uneven by its nature.
So the choice is between range and consistency, and it is a genuine trade rather than a trick question with one right answer. A fixed cast of 125 cannot compete with an open catalogue on breadth and it is not trying to. What it offers instead is that every profile got attention, so the odds of a conversation coming apart after four exchanges are lower than they are in a stream. If the browsing is the part you enjoy, take the range. If you would rather read three profiles, pick one and stop shopping, take the cast. Neither answer is wrong, and only one of them is yours.
Here is what carries between visits: the conversation itself. It is saved and it is still there when you come back, with everything said in it, so you can close the tab on a Tuesday and pick the thread up on a Friday without starting again from the beginning. That is a real thing and it is what most people mean when they ask whether a companion remembers them. Within one conversation she has what was said in it, and a long thread reads as continuous rather than as a series of introductions to a stranger. Close the tab again and it will still be waiting the next time.
Here is what does not carry: anything from one conversation into a separate one. Start a new conversation and it starts empty. Nothing is accumulated about you across the account, there is no profile of you being assembled quietly in the background, and there are no mood graphs, no weekly reports and no streaks to keep up. This is worth being blunt about, because the wording used across this whole category tends to suggest more than any of these products do, and somebody skimming a page like this should not come away believing otherwise. Better said here than discovered in month two.
How Chai handles continuity is a question for Chai, and their own documentation is where to read it rather than a page written by a competitor. What is worth saying in general is that memory claims are the least reliable part of the marketing in this category, on every product in it, and the only way to learn what something actually keeps is to use it for a fortnight and notice what it has forgotten. Test it deliberately if it matters to you. Mention something specific, come back two days later, and ask about it. What it answers with is the real documentation.
Your conversations here are readable by you and by nobody else. That is not a promise in a paragraph, it is a rule in the database: the security rules key every conversation to the account that wrote it, so another signed in user asking the server for it is refused by the server rather than by the interface. Nobody reading the catalogue can see who you have talked to, and the companions are not shared state, so your version of a conversation with somebody is yours alone and does not touch anybody else's version of her. No shared history, no shared thread, nothing pooled.
What that does not mean is that your messages exist nowhere but on your screen. They are stored so they can be resumed, and they are sent to a language model to be answered, because that is how any product of this kind produces a reply at all. Nothing here is end to end encrypted and no page on this site is going to claim that it is. If your test for a product is that nothing you type ever leaves your device, then no companion app passes it, this one included, and the honest thing to do is say so rather than sell around it. Hiding it would only make a nastier surprise later.
On the other side, the thing worth understanding about an open catalogue is that a bot is written by another user, and that writing includes the instructions the bot then follows. It is a different structure from a cast written in one place by one team, and it is neither better nor worse on its own, but it is a real difference in who authored the thing you are talking to. What either product does with your conversations is set out in its own privacy policy, and that is the document to read before committing an evening to either. It is short, and it is the only thing that binds anybody.
Pictures are generated inside the conversation here. You ask for one in the chat, the request goes out to an image model, and the picture comes back in the thread rather than in a separate tool you have to go and find first. It is part of the conversation rather than an attachment to it, and as the section above says, it is not gated behind the plan, which surprises people who assume every worthwhile part of a product of this kind sits on the far side of a checkout page somewhere. There is no separate charge for a picture and no pack of credits to buy first.
There are no voice calls here. No phone calls, no video calls, no spoken replies, nothing at all that turns a companion into somebody you talk to out loud. If a voice is the part you want, this product does not have it and there is no point pretending that text is close enough to count. What gets sent when you use this is text, and pictures when you ask for them, and that is the whole surface of it. A page listing voice among the features would be describing something that has never been built. If that ever changes, this page will say so and not before.
Chai is arranged around text conversation, and whatever it offers beyond that is documented on its own site rather than guessed at on this one. The general point, on either product, is to check what a feature actually does before paying for it. A word like images can mean a picture in the thread, a gallery you visit separately, or an avatar that never changes, and those are three different products. Ask for one and see what arrives, in the free part of whichever you are trying, before deciding. Five minutes of the real thing beats an afternoon of feature lists.
There is no import and no export, so moving here is starting again rather than transferring anything across. That is the honest version and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it. If you decide to try this alongside what you already use, the order below wastes the least time and settles the question fastest.
No. It runs in a browser on any device, including a phone browser, and there is no native app for iOS or Android and nothing to install from a store. That is a genuine difference from Chai and it is the first thing anybody comparing the two should know. A browser works, and on a laptop it is a better place for a long conversation than a phone is, but it is not the same as an icon on a home screen. If an app is what you want, take the app.
No. There is no import from Chai or from any other service, and there is no export out of here either. Whatever history you have built up somewhere else stays where it is, and starting here means starting from an empty conversation with somebody new. That is a real cost of trying this and no comparison page should skip past it. If the history you already have is worth a lot to you, weigh that against everything else on this page rather than after you have decided.
No, and it is one of the two rows in the table above that we lose. There is no way to build a companion from scratch, no character editor, no way to write a personality and publish it for other people to talk to. The 125 companions in the catalogue are what exists and the cast is the product. If making one yourself is the part you are looking forward to, Chai does that and this does not, and no amount of catalogue is a substitute for it.
No to both. All 125 companions are women, there are no male companions and there is no way to add one. There are also no voice calls, no phone calls and no video calls of any kind, so nothing here is spoken aloud. These are stated plainly because a page that left them out would be letting somebody pay for a product they had misread. If either matters to you, this is not the one, and finding that out on this page costs you nothing.
Five a month. That is the free allowance and it is deliberately small: it exists so you can hear how a written companion actually writes before deciding whether to pay for more. Paying removes the limit entirely and there is no balance to top up afterwards. Five messages is enough to judge the writing and not enough to have an evening, which is the honest description of what a free tier of that size is for on a product of this kind.
Within one conversation, yes. It is saved, it is still there when you come back, and it resumes with everything that was said in it. Across separate conversations, no. A new conversation starts empty and nothing is carried over from another one, and there is no profile of you being built quietly in the background across the account. If a companion who accumulates a picture of you over months is what you are after, that is not what this product does and you should look elsewhere for it.
No. The security rules on the database key every conversation to the account that wrote it, so another signed in user asking for yours is refused by the server rather than politely hidden by the interface. What that does not mean is that the messages exist only on your screen. They are stored so they can be resumed, and they are sent to a language model in order to be answered. Nothing here is end to end encrypted and this site will not claim that it is.
Both can fill an hour and neither is treatment. That is the whole honest answer. A companion app, this one or theirs, is not therapy, not counselling and not a crisis service, and anybody selling one to you as a fix for loneliness is overselling it. If loneliness is heavy or persistent for you, that is worth taking to a doctor or a crisis line in your country, and it is worth doing that whether or not you also enjoy talking to a companion in the evening.
None whatsoever. There is no partnership, no affiliate arrangement, no sponsorship and no payment in either direction. Nothing on this page earns anybody a commission whichever product you end up choosing, and the rows in the table were picked here rather than agreed with anybody. It is our comparison of somebody else's product, written from their public pages, which is exactly why the sections above spend as long as they do saying where Chai is the better answer.
Yes, and it is good at something this is not built for at all. A native app with a feed of community made bots is a genuinely different product from a browser tab with a fixed cast, and for short bursts on a phone the app is simply the better shape. The open catalogue means range this cannot match, the ability to make and publish a bot is a real feature that does not exist here, and the discovery loop is well built for the way people actually use a phone. If any of that is what you came for, install it and enjoy it.
Reading the catalogue settles this faster than another comparison page will, so spend five minutes with the companions and see whether anybody in it is somebody you want to talk to. If the answer is yes, the plans are on one short page.
