Chai review: an 18+ character chat app with unpublished prices

We read Chai's website, Safety Center, End User License Agreement and Privacy Policy, and opened its Google Play and App Store pages from a US connection. We did not create an account. Chai has no web version, the App Store link on its site returned a "can't be found" page for the US store, and sign-up works only inside the app with a Google, Facebook or Apple account, sometimes followed by a selfie or ID check. Everything below comes from Chai's own pages and store listings, not from chatting with it.

Chai is made by Chai Research Corp. in Palo Alto. In the app you browse characters created by other users, chat with them, or build your own and keep it private or share it. The company runs its own models on thousands of GPUs and says it serves over a trillion tokens a day.

It is a phone app only. The Android version on Google Play has more than 10 million downloads and an average user rating of 2.4 from about 850,000 reviews. The iPhone version that Chai's site links to was not available in the US App Store on the day we checked, even though Chai's pages still describe it as rated 18+ there.

Chai does not publish its prices. The company says it earns its revenue from subscriptions, in-app purchases and advertising, roughly 60 percent from purchases and 40 percent from ads. The free version shows ads, and the Safety Center adds that in some regions you need a paid subscription to use the app at all. Because you pay through Google Play or Apple, refunds follow their rules; Chai has no refund policy of its own on its site.

On paper Chai is strict. The EULA says the platform is "strictly restricted to users aged 18 and older", and where app stores or local law require it, Chai checks age through Persona with a selfie estimate or a government ID. Google Play still rates the Android app Mature 17+, not 18+.

The content rules ban sexually explicit images and videos, any sexual content involving minors and sexual content about real people without their documented consent, and the Safety Center says the models are built to refuse sexually explicit text. That makes Chai a poor fit for NSFW chat. One mismatch is worth knowing: the Google Play description invites you to chat with "your favorite celebrity" and create characters that "exist in reality", while the EULA requires written consent from any identifiable person in user-made characters.

You can delete your account in the app under Profile, Settings, Delete Account, and Chai says this removes your personal data subject to legal retention. The same policy allows keeping data for up to five years after deletion. Free users get personalised ads with consent, and Chai may share usage data with advertising partners. The policy we read does not say whether chats are used to train Chai's models.

Pick it if you want a large, free, ad-supported library of chat characters on Android and you are fine with SFW-leaning conversations.

Skip it if you want explicit roleplay, a web or iPhone app you can rely on, clear prices before you subscribe, or a service that keeps real people out of its character catalog.