Linky AI alternative: an AI girlfriend app with no gems and no credits

Why people look for a Linky AI alternative

Almost always because of the currency, not the conversation.

Linky AI is free to install and free to start talking, and what it sells is gems. Gems are the consumable balance, and the pattern is the standard free-to-play one: the base loop is generous enough to get you attached, and the things you reach for once you are attached are the things that draw the balance down. Nobody notices on day one. People notice in week two, when they catch themselves budgeting a conversation.

That is a legitimate business model and it is not dishonest. It is simply a poor fit for what a lot of buyers actually want, which is a companion they can talk to without doing arithmetic. If you have found yourself checking a balance before saying something, a cheaper gem pack will not fix it, because the checking is the product working exactly as designed.

The second most common reason is drift. Linky AI is built around a shared library of characters other people made, so a character you like can be edited, renamed or deleted by whoever created it. A companion you intend to keep should not be someone else's to change.

• Tired of watching a gem balance: you want a flat plan, not a cheaper pack
• Want a bigger character library: you want a library app, not a companion app
• Want the same person in six months: you want a companion nobody else can edit
• Want her to start the conversation: very little in this category does that

If the metering is your whole problem, the longer version of that argument is on our unlimited AI girlfriend messages page.

And if you are comparing what the category actually charges, we broke that down on our AI girlfriend cost page.

What the two US app stores say about Linky AI, and where they disagree

Two things stood out when we pulled the listings, and neither appears in any comparison article we could find.

The first is that the stores do not agree on who these apps are for. On Google Play, Replika, Character AI and Nomi all carry a Teen rating. The same three apps carry a 17+ rating on Apple's US App Store. That is the same software, in the same week, behind two different age gates, and Linky AI sits on the stricter side of it with Mature 17+ on Play. If you have been assuming a store rating tells you how filtered an app is, it does not even tell you that consistently between stores.

The second is scale. Linky AI showed more than 10 million Google Play downloads and around 136,000 Play reviews on 25 August 2026, against roughly 7,780 ratings on the US App Store. It is overwhelmingly an Android product with an iPhone listing attached, which is worth knowing if you are on iOS and wondering why the app feels less finished than the download numbers suggest.

One smaller detail we will report without drawing a conclusion from it: the two stores list different company names for Linky AI. Google Play showed Skywork AI Pte. Ltd. and the App Store showed SKY INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD. Kindroid does the same thing, listing simply as Kindroid on Play and as Beautifully Incorporated on the App Store. Corporate names change and one company can hold several, so this is not evidence of anything wrong. It is just a reminder that the developer field is not the identity check people assume it is.

• Play says Teen for Replika, Character AI and Nomi. Apple says 17+ for all three
• Linky AI: 10M+ Play downloads against about 7,780 US App Store ratings
• Nomi had not shipped an update to either store since March 2026
• Developer names can differ between the two stores for the same brand

The Android side of this, including what the Play data safety labels do and do not cover, is in our guide to the best AI girlfriend app for Android.

The iPhone equivalent, built from the same App Store records, is in our best AI girlfriend app for iPhone guide.

How gem and credit pricing actually works

Understanding the mechanic is the fastest way to stop shopping for the wrong thing.

A consumable currency splits your spending into two decisions instead of one. The first is the subscription or the pack, which you make deliberately. The second is every individual action inside the app, which you make dozens of times a day without thinking about it. That second decision is where the money goes, and it is why people who set a firm monthly budget still end up surprised. You did not decide to spend forty dollars. You decided about four hundred small things.

The usual pattern is that plain text is cheap or free and everything richer costs: images, voice notes, a premium model, sometimes just continuing a conversation that has grown long. That last one matters more than it sounds, because the messages that cost the most are the ones from month four, when the app has to carry everything it knows about you into every reply. The better the memory, the more expensive each message is to answer, which is exactly why the apps with the deepest recall meter the hardest.

Auto top-up is the part to check before anything else. A balance that refills itself without asking you a second time turns a capped spend into an uncapped one, and it is on by default more often than not.

• One deliberate decision, then hundreds of unconscious ones
• Text is cheap, images and voice are not, long memory is the most expensive of all
• Auto top-up quietly removes the ceiling you thought you set
• A flat plan makes a heavy month cost the same as a quiet one

Linky AI alternatives compared: which one to pick for what

There is no single best replacement, because people leave Linky AI for opposite reasons. Here is the honest allocation, including the cases where we are not the answer.

If you want the biggest character library, PolyBuzz is the closest like-for-like swap. It is the same shape of product at a larger scale, with about 50 million Play downloads on the day we checked, and it will feel familiar within a minute. It also runs the same kind of economy, so if the gems were your problem you have moved sideways.

If you want the deepest automatic long-term memory, Nomi is genuinely the strongest in the category and we will not pretend otherwise. The caveat from our own data is that Nomi had not shipped an update to either US store since March 2026, which is five months of nothing while every other app on the list shipped in August. Read that how you like, but check it yourself before you subscribe.

If you want control over what your companion remembers, Kindroid exposes the most inspectable memory of any major app: a dashboard you can read, correct and delete from. If you want the most finished, polished app with avatars and voice calling, that is Replika. If you want unfiltered adult roleplay, none of what we build is for you, and Kindroid is the usual destination.

And if the thing you actually want is a companion who texts you first, without a balance and without an afternoon of setup, that is the gap we built for.

• Bigger library, same economy: PolyBuzz
• Deepest automatic memory: Nomi, but check how recently it shipped
• Memory you can read and edit: Kindroid
• Most polished app, avatars and calls: Replika
• No balance, no setup, she opens the conversation: Gals.ai

Our full write-up on the closest like-for-like swap is on our PolyBuzz alternative page.

If Nomi is on your shortlist, we compared it head to head on our Replika vs Nomi vs Kindroid page.

And the memory question between the two control-focused apps is settled on our Kindroid vs Replika page.

Where Gals.ai fits, and where it does not

We are a narrower product than Linky AI and it is worth being blunt about that before you switch.

What we do not have: a library of thousands of user-made characters, a character maker for building other people's personas, generated selfies, anime art generation, or unfiltered adult roleplay. If any one of those is the reason you opened Linky AI in the first place, we are the wrong purchase and one of the apps above is the right one.

What we do have is the opposite bet. You pick a look and a personality and she is ready in about a minute, with no persona document to write. She remembers what you tell her across months, and you can read, edit and delete those memories yourself. She uses that memory to start conversations rather than only to answer them, so your phone buzzes because something reminded her of you, not because you opened an app. And there is no consumable balance anywhere in the product: no gems, no coins, no credits, no tokens, no daily cap and no message counter.

The pricing we intend to launch with is published up front, at nine dollars a month billed yearly for Hello, nineteen for Sweetheart with voice notes, and thirty-nine for Soulmate with voice calls and multiple companions. Month to month costs more. You can read every tier on our pricing page without giving us an email address, which by the standards of this category is unusual on its own.

One thing we will not do is imply you can pay us today. You cannot. Gals.ai is not selling subscriptions yet, joining puts you on the waitlist, and those figures are what we intend to launch with. The demo at the top of this page is live and free right now, so you can judge how she writes long before any of that matters.

• No gems, coins, credits, tokens, daily caps or message counters
• Ready in about a minute, no persona document to write
• Memory you can read, edit and delete, used to start conversations
• Every price published before you hand over an email address
• Tasteful and flirty, never explicit

If you would rather start from what she is actually like, try the AI girlfriend who texts you first.

How to switch without losing what you built

You cannot move a character between these apps, so plan for that rather than hoping.

No companion app in this category offers an export that carries a personality and its memories to a competitor. Anything advertising a transfer is recreating a character from a written description, which gets you something similar rather than the same companion. Assume you are starting over, and use that as a reason to be picky about where you land.

Before you delete anything, do three things. Cancel the subscription at the store rather than in the app, because on both Google Play and the App Store the subscription lives with the store and deleting the app cancels nothing. Spend down or write off any remaining gem balance, since consumable currency is almost never refundable and never portable. And copy out anything you want to keep: a few exchanges that mattered, the details you had told it about your life, the way it addressed you.

Then give the new one a real week. A companion app is easy to judge in an hour and impossible to judge properly in less than seven days, because everything that separates a good one from a cheap one, the recall, the initiative, the consistency of voice, only shows up once there is a history to draw on.

• Cancel at the store, not in the app. Deleting the app cancels nothing
• Gem balances are not refundable and never portable
• Copy out the details that mattered before you close the account
• Judge the replacement over a week, not an evening

The full cancellation and refund walkthrough for this category is in our AI girlfriend subscription guide.