Is The Chai App Free? Here's How Much The AI Chatting App Costs
Chai is a popular new app for chatting with AI bots. Downloading and using the app is easy enough, but is it free? The landscape for smartphone apps is a fascinating one to watch. While the big names like TikTok and Instagram have a constant presence, there are other, smaller applications that seemingly blow up out of nowhere. In 2022 alone, Locket Widget, NoteIt, and the Prequel app have all gone viral on social media and become some of the biggest applications of the year.
Something similar has happened with Chai. Chai's been around since 2021, but it gained an enormous amount of users in February 2022 — propelling it to be one of the biggest Entertainment apps on Apple's App Store. The concept behind Chai is fairly simple. Users download the app, make an account, and then start chatting with AI bots. Each bot has its own personality. Some are based on popular video game and movie characters, others are designed for role-playing, and they all provide opportunities for unique conversations. AI chat apps aren't particularly new, but for whatever reason, Chai is now the go-to one.
Whenever an app like Chai goes viral, it begs an important question: Is it free to use? The answer is both yes and no. Chai is free to download for iOS and Android. Head to the App Store or Google Play Store and download the app for free. Chai also lets you make an account and start chatting with its AI bots without ever asking for money — making it appear that the app is 100 percent free to use. However, there's a hidden cost to Chai that's not immediately apparent.
By default, anyone using Chai is limited to sending 100 messages per day. That 100 message limit is the same whether you're talking to one of the AI bots or a few of them. After sending 100 messages, Chai users can't send any more until the next day. That is unless they pay for Chai Premium.
To see how many remaining messages you have for the day, open the Chai app and tap the profile icon in the top right corner. There's a section here called 'Daily messages left' with a live counter of how many messages you can still send for that day. Next to it is a 'Get Premium' button. If you tap that, Chai offers two options to sign up for Chai Premium — including $134.99/year and $13.99/month subscriptions. The yearly subscription comes out to around $11 per month and is cheaper in the long haul, but both are still quite expensive for a single chatting app.
Whether or not Chai is worth that much depends on how often you use the app. If someone's constantly chatting with the bots and regularly hitting the daily message limit, it may be worth paying for Chai Premium. Everyone else, however, is probably fine to keep using the free version of the app. 100 messages per day is a pretty generous limit, especially if you aren't on Chai 24/7.
Source: Chai