You have been on one app for a couple of months. Now something newer is being recommended to you, or your tier has gone up, or the writing has started to feel flat, so you open the alternatives and compare the feature lists. That is the wrong comparison. Switching AI girlfriend apps is not a question of which product wins on paper — it is a question of what the move costs, and almost all of that cost sits on the side you already own.
What transfers when switching AI girlfriend apps
Nothing does. There is no export format for a companion, no import button on the other side, and no standard two of these apps have agreed on. Everything you built over two months — the facts it learned, the tone you settled into, the history that made last week make sense — lives in one company's database in one company's shape, and stops at the edge of the account.
Data protection law helps less than you would expect. In the UK, the right to data portability entitles you to a copy of the data you gave an organisation, in a machine-readable format, and in some cases to have it sent on to another organisation where that is technically feasible. For a companion app it usually is not: you may receive a file, but nobody has built anything that reads it. A right to a copy is not a right to continuity.
Two other things stay behind. The subscription does not move, because it was bought from that developer through a store, and any coin balance is tied to the same account. Credits are the worst thing to be holding when you leave — our guide to what a coin really costs explains why they are sized to make you buy ahead.
The real cost is the fortnight, not the fee
Price the move the way you would price a tier. The new subscription is the visible number, and it is the smaller one. The real cost is the two to four weeks of re-establishing: telling it your job again, re-tuning the personality settings until the replies stop reading like a stranger's, and waiting for the stored facts to build up enough that a conversation can refer back to something.
A new app also flatters itself early. The first week on anything in this category is the best week, because the writing is unfamiliar and the model has not yet repeated a phrase you recognise. The app you are leaving had that week too; you have simply spent it. Judging on the first few evenings sets a new app's strongest moment against an old app's most ordinary one, which is how people end up moving twice.
Then there is the overlap. Keeping the old subscription running while you test the new one is the sensible way to do it, and it means paying twice for a few weeks. That is part of the price of switching AI girlfriend apps, and it belongs in the sum.
The memory is the expensive part, and it is the one thing that does not come with you. You are not buying a better app. You are buying it twice.
When moving is genuinely the right call
Some reasons survive that arithmetic. The strongest is a structural mismatch: if you want continuity and picked an app built around breadth, no tier will fix it, because the architecture is the limit. Our piece on the three shapes underneath the listings is the quickest way to tell whether that is your situation.
The second is a paywall that has moved. Apps here change their metering more often than they change their writing, and a plan that was a flat fee at signup can become a flat fee plus a meter. If you are paying more for the same evening than you agreed to, that is a real reason to leave — on the current price of the alternative, not the price you remember.
The third is the one people ignore: a memory that never worked. If you have told it the same thing four times and it still opens with a generic greeting, you are paying a premium for a feature the app does not deliver — what memory should buy you has the test.
Some reasons do not survive. Boredom at week three is usually about how you are writing rather than what you are writing to, and a flat conversation often picks up when you stop asking open questions and start giving it something to work with. Moving for that is an expensive way to get a change you could have had for free.
Write the handover page before you go
If nothing exports, the only portability is the kind you do by hand, and it takes about fifteen minutes. Before you stop using the old app, write down what it knew. Not a transcript — a page.
Ten to fifteen lines covers it: the specifics about you that you were happy for it to hold and no more; the personality settings you ended up with, in the words the old app used, so you can approximate them in the new one's fields; and two or three things the character did that you liked, with one or two you did not. Paste the relevant half into the first session on the new app and set the rest in its settings screen. It will not feel the same on day one, and it will cut weeks off the re-establishing.
Write it before you cancel anything: access to your history ends when the billing period does, and on some apps the log sits behind the paid tier.
The order to do it in
Overlap deliberately, then close the old account properly.
- Run the new app's free tier for a week while the old subscription is still live. Give it three or four specifics from your handover page on day one, then see on day seven whether they come back unprompted. That is the comparison worth making.
- Cancel the old subscription where you bought it. Deleting the app does not do it: Apple's guidance on deleting apps says plainly that removing an app does not cancel its in-app subscriptions, so the charge continues against an app you no longer have. Cancelling still leaves you access until the end of the period you paid for, so there is no reason to do it early.
- Spend or write off the coin balance before that date. It will not be refunded and it will not travel.
- Ask for deletion, separately. Cancelling closes the billing relationship and nothing else; the account and its stored conversations stay where they are until you ask. Our guide to what deletion should cost covers what a good path looks like.
Notice how hard the old app makes step two: that is a verdict on it. How clearly the new one shows its price and its metering before you pay is the best early signal you will get about the next two months. The app we currently recommend states its memory behaviour and its meters on the pricing page, which makes step one a short job rather than a month of guessing.
Frequently asked questions
Can I transfer my AI companion to another app?
No. There is no shared format and no import tool, so the character, the memory and the history stay with the app you built them in. The closest thing to a transfer is a page of notes you write yourself and paste into the new app's first session.
Will it be the same if I use the same name and settings?
Closer, but not the same. The personality fields steer the model, the writing style comes from a different model with different tuning, and the stored facts that made the old conversation specific are not there yet. Expect a few weeks before it reads like a continuation.
Should I cancel the old app before I try a new one?
Not usually. Cancelling keeps your access until the end of the period you have already paid for, so you can test the new app on its free tier during the overlap and still have the old history to copy from. Cancel once the week is up and you have written your handover page.
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