What an AI Image, a Voice Minute and a Video Clip Actually Cost You in 2026

The subscription is the floor, not the price. On every multimedia AI companion platform, the monthly fee buys unlimited text and a fixed allowance of everything else. Images, voice minutes and video clips are metered, and the unit rates are what actually determine your bill. This is a teardown of those rates and how to read them before you subscribe.

Nobody publishes this comparison because it makes the cheap-looking plans look worse and the expensive-looking plans look better, which is exactly why it is worth doing.

The two pricing models

Almost everything in this category is one of two shapes, and the shape matters more than the number.

Bundled allowance. You pay a monthly fee and receive a quantity of internal currency for the billing cycle. Media draws that balance down at published rates. OurDream is the clearest example, with DreamCoins allocated per cycle, images at roughly 10 coins, voice messages at roughly 5, and voice calls at roughly 50 a minute. At a 1,000 coin allocation, that is on the order of a hundred images if you spend the balance on nothing else, which for most people means images are effectively included and voice is the thing that empties the tank.

Metered on top. You pay a monthly fee for unlimited text, and media costs tokens purchased separately or drawn from a small included grant. Candy AI runs this way, with a subscription that looks inexpensive on the annual plan and image, voice and video consumption charged in tokens above it. The advertised price is real. It is also not what a heavy user pays.

Neither model is dishonest. They optimize for different users, and the mistake is picking on the headline number without knowing which user you are.

Do the conversion before you subscribe

Three questions get you the actual number.

What does one image cost in the platform's currency, and what does that currency cost in dollars. Multiply by how many images you realistically generate in a session, then by sessions per month. People routinely underestimate this by a factor of five, because generation is fast and the friction is low by design.

Does unused allowance roll over. Often it does not. OurDream's coins are per billing cycle rather than a balance that accumulates, which is worth knowing before you plan around saving up for a big video month.

Is voice priced per minute or per message. These are different products with wildly different costs. A voice message is a short render. A live call is continuous synthesis, and it is the single most expensive thing you can do on any of these platforms.

Where the money actually goes

For most users the spend order is voice, then video, then images, and that order surprises people because images feel like the main event.

Voice calls run continuously, so cost scales with time rather than with actions, and a twenty minute conversation costs more than an evening of image generation on most coin schedules. If voice is central to how you use a companion, that is the line item to price the whole decision around.

Video sits in the middle because clips are short and generation is deliberate. Candy's Live Action clips run up to 120 seconds and OurDream caps shorter, and video quality and reliability differ enough that a failed generation is a real cost consideration on the platform where failures are more common.

Images are the cheapest per unit and the easiest to overspend on, because there is nothing stopping you from generating forty of them looking for one that works. Consistency is what saves money here. A platform that produces the same face reliably needs fewer attempts per usable result, which is a genuine cost advantage even when the per-image rate is identical. That is the case for Candy AI on visual work, and our review covers what the V2 engine actually changed.

Verify prices yourself, every time

One thing worth stating plainly: pricing in this category changes faster than anyone can maintain, and a large amount of circulating information is stale.

When we last checked live pages during a publishing pass, Candy AI's monthly price was $13.99 with an annual plan bringing the effective monthly figure to roughly $3.99, which does not match several widely repeated figures. OurDream's coin allocation was per billing cycle rather than auto-refreshing. Neither platform showed Pix as a payment option despite claims otherwise.

Take that as a demonstration rather than as a current price sheet. Our Candy AI pricing and OurDream AI pricing pages carry the figures we verified and the date we verified them, and the vendor's own pricing page always outranks both.

The annual number

A plan that looks like pocket change monthly is $150 to $170 a year at anything near $13 a month. Add metered media at any real usage level and two to three times that is the normal range rather than the extreme, which we worked through platform by platform in the real cost of AI companions over a year.

The relevant comparison is not against other companion apps. It is against what else that money does, which is a decision nobody else can make for you and which most platforms are structurally designed to keep you from making at all.

Which one is actually cheaper for you

If you generate a lot of images and use voice occasionally, a bundled allowance usually wins even at a higher sticker price, which points at OurDream, where the included coin budget absorbs normal image use.

If you mostly text and want media occasionally, the metered model wins, because you are not paying monthly for an allowance you do not spend. That points at Candy AI, which also happens to be the strongest of the two on image consistency.

If you barely use media at all, you are paying a multimedia premium for a text product. SpicyChat has the most generous free text tier in the category and CrushOn prices long-form roleplay without the media layer, and either is a better fit than a multimedia subscription you use for chat.

When you have picked, the entry points are Candy, OurDream, SpicyChat and CrushOn.

And if you have not decided yet, pay monthly for the first few months rather than taking the annual discount. The discount is real. So is the risk of prepaying a year on a platform that changes its terms in month four, which happened repeatedly across this category in 2026.