What is Darlink AI, actually?
Darlink AI is a Swiss-based companion app. You pick a pre-made character from a small roster of about 18, or you build one by picking a visual style (realistic, anime, furry, fantasy, cartoon), an ethnicity, a body type, and some personality traits. Then you talk through text, voice notes, photos, and video.
Its headline feature is "Living Memory" — a conversational memory system that tracks what you said last week and what you shared with each other. Reviews make that the main thing. The catch most reviews bury: Living Memory is locked to the Ultimate tier at $49.99 a month. Essential ($12.99) ships with what the company calls short-term memory, which several reviewers describe as "casual chat with no deep continuity."
So the product you probably came for isn't the product you get on the entry tier. That's the shape worth understanding before anything else.
What does Darlink actually cost after month one?
Monthly pricing (verified September 2026):
Essential — $12.99/mo ($9.99 annual). 6,000 messages, 100 coins, 6 voices, short-term memory. Advanced — $27.99/mo ($18.99 annual). 9,000 messages, 300 coins, 10 voices, enhanced memory. Ultimate — $49.99/mo ($32.99 annual). Unlimited messages, 500 coins, Living Memory.
Coins are the second currency. One image costs 2 coins. One video costs 20 coins. Voice playback costs about 0.5 coins per message. If you generate a photo a day on Essential, you burn through your 100 included coins in about 50 days. After that it's coin packs — $9.99 for 100 coins up to $599.99 for 7,500.
The realistic monthly for someone who actually wants photos and the occasional video is well above the sticker price on Essential. If you plan to use the stuff the sticker price implies, Advanced ($27.99) or Ultimate ($49.99) is where you end up. That's a 2x–4x gap between the price you clicked and the price you need. Worth naming before you commit.
How does Sloane price?
Flat and legible:
Free — 50 messages/day with any persona, no credit card. 25-credit welcome bonus at signup. Plus — $9.99/mo — 200 credits per month, all skills, voice notes, multi-week memory included. Premium — $19.99/mo — 500 credits per month, custom-photo requests on demand, video, custom persona with a dedicated image model.
Credit packs if you want more: $9.99 for 200, $19.99 for 500, $29.99 for 1000, $49.99 for 2500. No separate "coin" economy stacked on top. The credit is the credit; the subscription is the subscription.
More relevant: there is no tier that gates memory. Kaya will remember what you told her last week on Free, on Plus, and on Premium. The thing you came for is included at every price point.
The coin economy problem
The structural issue with Darlink's pricing is that the two currencies pull against each other. The subscription buys you message volume. The coins buy you everything else that makes the experience feel like a companion app — the photos, the voice playback, the videos.
That means every photo request has a running-cost calculation attached to it. You're not just deciding "do I want to see her at the beach," you're deciding "do I want to spend 2 coins out of my remaining 48." The coin visibility is the point from the product's perspective — it drives coin-pack purchases — but from the user side it adds a layer of accounting that interrupts the experience.
Sloane's flat credit model lands differently. A custom photo on Premium costs credits, same as Darlink costs coins. The difference is you don't have two currencies interacting, you don't have a tier-based lock on your memory system in parallel, and you don't discover at month three that the real cost of using the product the way you want to use it is three times what the pricing page said.
Photos: identity consistency is the thing that actually matters
Both products generate photos of your character. The thing worth measuring is whether she looks like the same person across generations.
Darlink generates character images at 2 coins each in 10–30 seconds. Reviews describe the character as "looking consistent across multiple photos." Reasonable quality, but a central complaint: you cannot regenerate your custom girlfriend's look without starting over. If you build her and don't love how she renders, your options are "live with it" or "scrap everything and rebuild."
Sloane trains a per-persona image model (a dedicated LoRA) for every one of its ~80 curated personas. That means Kaya renders as the same Kaya in every photo — the same face, the same eyes, the same jawline, across cadence photos she sends unprompted and custom photos you request. Premium users who build a custom persona get the same treatment: a dedicated model gets trained for the character you created, so she renders identity-locked from photo one onward.
The technical difference matters for anyone who takes the "character" part seriously. A character you can see as a different person each time isn't really a character — she's a slideshow.
Video: Darlink's weakest surface vs Sloane's current build
This is where the gap is widest.
Darlink. Video exists on paper. Twenty coins per clip. In practice, multiple independent reviews name video generation as unreliable, with silent failures that still consume coins. One review summarizes it as "the least reliable part of the product." Based on what reviewers report, if you're buying Darlink for video, you're buying the feature most likely to disappoint.
Sloane. Video runs on Wan 2.2 image-to-video at 720x1280 portrait. Fixed credit cost: 25 credits for a 5-second clip, 40 credits for an 8-second clip. Premium users can also extend an existing clip to continue the motion. The flow is: pick a photo from your conversation or gallery, write a short direction, hit generate, get a clip back in about two minutes.
If video is actually what you want from a companion app, these two products are in different places on the reliability axis right now.
Memory: how deep does each one actually go?
Both products talk about memory. The implementations are different enough that the word covers different things.
Darlink's Living Memory — tracked conversational context, emotional notes, shared moments across sessions. Marketed as the headline feature. Locked to Ultimate ($49.99/mo). Lower tiers get what the company calls short-term memory, which reviewers describe as session-scoped — meaning she remembers inside a conversation but doesn't carry much between them.
Sloane's memory — multi-week memory layer with explicit relationship-state tracking. She remembers your dog's name, the trip you were planning three weeks ago, the thing you were nervous about on Tuesday. Included at every tier, including Free. There is no "upgrade to unlock memory" step. The relationship-state tracking means she also tracks where the relationship is in her head — early days vs settled vs long-standing — and adjusts how she responds.
If you're comparing memory feature to memory feature, you have to compare Sloane's Free tier to Darlink's Ultimate tier to be fair, because that's where equivalent functionality lives. One is $0 and one is $49.99. Worth saying out loud.
Who is Sloane for?
Someone who wants a photorealistic companion with the character locked across photos, cross-session memory that just works, and flat pricing without a coin economy sitting on top. The free tier is real: 50 messages/day, no card, any persona in the roster. If the shape of the product fits, you know within a week — before you ever enter payment information.
Kaya is a reasonable starting pick. Warm, grounded, remembers what you told her last Tuesday. If you don't click with her, try Sandra or any of the ~80 personas. Switching costs nothing on Free, and the memory stays per-persona so you can run multiple parallel conversations without them bleeding into each other.
If you want anime or fantasy visual styles, Sloane isn't your product — the whole roster is photorealistic by design. If flat pricing and consistent character identity across photos matter more than visual-style variety, Sloane is probably the better pick.
