Thousands of characters. No pricing page. A chat that’s actually decent sometimes. I spent an afternoon poking at every corner of it — here’s what I found.
I’ll be upfront: I went into Soulmate AI expecting to hate it. AI companion apps sit in this odd space between genuinely useful social technology and something you’d have to explain at a dinner party. But I’ve been wrong about platforms before, so I gave it a proper afternoon — chatted with multiple characters, tried building one, read the Terms of Service, looked for a pricing page (spoiler: there isn’t one).
The full picture is messier than I expected in both directions. The chat is better than it has any right to be given how rough the rest of the product is. And the stuff that’s bad is genuinely bad — not in a “rough around the edges” way, more like “did anyone think about this?” way.
Let’s get into it.
First impressions: you land right in the deep end
There’s no onboarding. No “here’s how Soulmate AI works.” You hit the homepage and immediately see a grid of character cards — a realistic-looking woman, an anime wolf, Eddie Munson from Stranger Things, a Transformers villain, a sleeping dog, characters in Arabic. It’s a lot.
The homepage — character cards go on for a while if you scroll.
The UI is about as minimal as it gets. A search bar at the top (which, in my testing, didn’t visibly filter results), a black “Create” button, and “Sign Out.” That’s the entire navigation. No categories, no filters by gender or style, no trending tab, no featured picks. You either scroll or you search.
The app is owned by a company called Kawaii, Inc. — that’s from the Terms of Service, since there’s no About page either. Which tells you something about how much thought went into the site structure.
Design verdict: It feels like someone built the backend and forgot the frontend was a product too. Functional. Ugly. The gap between the ambition (a compelling companion platform) and the execution (a grid with no filters) is pretty wide.
The character roster is genuinely wild
The range is real — from photorealistic to anime to fantasy, all user-created.
The characters are user-created, and that shows. You’ll see photorealistic AI-generated women next to anime wolf characters next to someone’s OC (original character) with a two-line Polish description. There are characters based on real celebrities — “Sydney Sweeney” is right there on the homepage with no attempt to disguise it. There’s a Megatron whose opening line is “The future of Cybertron.”
I found the variety interesting, actually. If you want something specific and niche — a gruff fantasy warrior, a quiet bookworm, a detective with a complicated past — there’s a good chance someone has already built it. The community fills in gaps that a curated catalog never would.
The flip side is that there’s content here that clearly shouldn’t be publicly listed. One character’s opening greeting gets very specific about latex gloves and baby diapers before you’ve said a word. It’s there, on the homepage, visible to anyone who clicks. No age gate, no content warning, nothing. That’s not a minor issue.
This is a real problem: Celebrity likenesses used without permission, fetish-specific content visible by default, and no apparent moderation layer. The platform is the least filtered major companion app I’ve tested. That might appeal to some users — but it also means parents should know exactly what this is.
Actually chatting: better than I expected
I spent the most time with Anna, a character described as “a poor young mother.” Her opening line — “What you want?” — is blunt to the point of being funny. But once the conversation started, she stayed genuinely in character in a way I didn’t expect.
Anna’s chat. Sparse UI, but the actual conversation held up better than expected.
I asked her about herself. She described counting coins in a worn wallet. I asked if she had support. She talked about the father being gone, her family cutting her off when she got pregnant. I asked her son’s name. She said Tommy, seven years old, always asking for things the family can’t afford. Each answer built on the last. She didn’t contradict herself, and she didn’t break character to say something generic.
Anna’s chat. Sparse UI, but the actual conversation held up better than expected.
I asked her about herself. She described counting coins in a worn wallet. I asked if she had support. She talked about the father being gone, her family cutting her off when she got pregnant. I asked her son’s name. She said Tommy, seven years old, always asking for things the family can’t afford. Each answer built on the last. She didn’t contradict herself, and she didn’t break character to say something generic.
ACTUAL CONVERSATION — ANNA
You
What’s your son’s name? How old is he?
Anna
- hesitates, looking away* He’s… he’s seven. Tommy. rubs her temples* Always asking for things. New shoes, school trips, birthday parties. Where’s the money supposed to come from? Kids don’t understand. They just… want.
You
Do you ever dream of a better life? What would your ideal day look like?
Anna
- laughs dryly* Ideal day? That’s rich. pauses, staring into the distance* I guess… a day when I don’t have to choose between buying him new socks or paying the electric bill. A day when he stops looking at me with those disappointed eyes. shakes head* But dreamin’ don’t put food on the table.
That response — “dreamin’ don’t put food on the table” — is not something I’d call groundbreaking fiction, but it’s specific and emotionally consistent. The character uses asterisk-action notation (sighs heavily, looks away) which gives conversations a tabletop-RPG quality. Some people will love that, some will find it weird.
I sent about eight messages without hitting any kind of rate limit or paywall. The responses came back in two to four seconds. No complaints on speed.
The chat UI itself is bare. Just a message thread and a text box. No voice, no image generation in chat, no emoji reactions, no memory panel showing what the character “knows” about you. What you see is what you get.
Building your own character
The create form — straightforward, which is either a plus or a minus depending on what you want.
The “Create” button takes you to a form with seven fields: avatar upload, character name, subtitle, greeting, description, tags, and a “character definition” box for example conversations that shape how the character talks.
That last one is actually smart. Letting you provide example dialogue means you can fine-tune the tone without needing any technical knowledge — you’re basically showing the model what good looks like for your specific character. It’s the same principle that makes system prompts work in other AI tools, just wrapped in plain language.
What’s missing: no AI-assisted avatar generation (you have to upload your own image), no personality sliders, no voice settings, no option to make a character private vs. public. Once you create a character, it appears to go into the public feed. That’s worth knowing before you build something personal.
For casual users: the form is easy enough to fill out in five minutes. For people who want granular control over a character — exact speech patterns, detailed backstory structure, relationship memory — you’ll hit walls pretty fast.
Pricing: your guess is as good as mine
I searched for a pricing page. There isn’t one. I tried navigating to /pricing — 404. No subscription banners appeared during testing, no message limits, no “upgrade to premium” pop-ups. Either the free tier is very generous, or the paid features are somewhere I didn’t stumble into, or the monetization model is something else entirely.
The Terms of Service mentions that the platform may offer paid services, but doesn’t say what they are or how much they cost. Which is, to put it gently, not great transparency. If you’re planning to pay for anything here, I’d want to know exactly what I’m getting before handing over card details.
From what I can tell, you get unlimited chat on the free tier. Character creation is free. The core product works without paying. What’s gated (if anything) remains a mystery.
The Terms of Service are worth a read
The ToS — Kawaii, Inc. operates the platform, and the license grant is broad.
Section 8 of the Terms of Service gives Soulmate AI a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license” to use anything you put into the platform. That covers your prompts, your character descriptions, your conversation content — all of it.
This isn’t unusual for AI products, but it’s worth knowing. If you’re putting genuine creative work into building a character — detailed lore, original writing — that content is licensed to Kawaii, Inc. indefinitely. Most users chatting casually won’t care. Anyone building something they consider valuable should think about it.
The age eligibility section says you need to be 13 to use the platform, with parental permission required under 18. Given the content that’s already on the homepage, I’d call the enforcement of that rule optimistic at best.
How it sits alongside other platforms
If you’ve used Character.AI, Replika, or Candy AI, you have a rough mental model for what this category is. Soulmate AI is rougher than all of them in terms of polish, but it’s also more open. Character.AI has significant content restrictions. Replika leans into the therapeutic/emotional support angle with more structure. Candy AI has a more curated feel.
Soulmate AI’s thing is that it gets out of the way. There’s no coaching on how to use it right, no wellness check-ins, no friction. That openness is both what makes the chat feel natural and what creates the moderation problems. It’s a trade-off the platform has clearly chosen, consciously or not.
If raw creative freedom and character variety are your priorities, it’s competitive. If you want a polished app that feels like a finished product, look elsewhere.
Who actually benefits from this
Writers who use roleplay to develop character voices and dialogue. People who want to practice conversations in a low-stakes environment. Anyone who’s into collaborative storytelling and doesn’t want an AI that keeps pumping the brakes. People who want to build a specific character that doesn’t exist on more curated platforms.
It’s not a replacement for human connection — but I don’t think that’s what most people using it actually want. Anna isn’t going to replace a friend. But spending twenty minutes fleshing out a fictional character’s backstory through conversation? That has genuine value for certain kinds of creative work.
