You have decided to try one, and the first surprise is that you cannot simply start talking. Signing up for an AI girlfriend app takes longer than it did a year ago: there is an age step, an account step, and a card step, and each one asks for something you may not want to give. None of it is difficult, but it is worth knowing what is coming and which decisions are annoying to reverse later. Here is the whole sequence, in the order you will meet it.
Why the sign-up screen got longer
Companion apps spent years as an unregulated corner of the app stores, and that has changed quickly. California became the first US state to write rules specifically for companion chatbots, with requirements that took effect at the start of 2026 — among them that a service tells you plainly that you are talking to software rather than a person. Other states have followed with their own versions, the UK now requires services that host adult material to check ages properly rather than ask, and Australia and several EU countries are moving the same way.
The practical effect for you is that the door is heavier than the room behind it. A service that operates in several countries generally builds one sign-up flow that satisfies the strictest of them, so you may go through an age check that your own country does not require. That is the main reason the process feels disproportionate to what you are signing up for.
The age check, and what it actually involves
An age check is not a birthday box. UK guidance names the methods that count as reliable — facial age estimation, photo-ID matching, or a credit card check — and most apps offering adult content now use one of the three, run by a third-party verification company rather than by the app itself.
The three differ in what they leave behind. Facial age estimation takes a selfie, returns an estimated age band, and — in the reputable implementations — deletes the image afterwards; look for that sentence before you take the picture. ID matching means uploading a passport or driving licence to a company you have never heard of, which is the heaviest option and the one worth avoiding if another is offered. A card check is the lightest: a small authorisation that is reversed, proving an adult payment instrument exists rather than telling anyone your name.
There is a fourth route you may already have. Apple can pass apps an age range from your account rather than your birthday, and sharing it is a setting you control, with options to always share, be asked each time, or never share. Google Play has an equivalent signal. If an app accepts that, it is the least invasive check available, because the store answers the question and the app never sees the underlying detail.
The question being answered is only ever "is this an adult". Anything a check collects beyond that is a cost, not a requirement.
The account, and the part people regret
Next comes the account itself: email, password, sometimes a phone number, usually an offer to sign in with a Google or Apple account instead. The offer is tempting because it is one tap, and it is the decision people most often wish they had made differently.
Signing in with an existing account ties the app to your real-name identity, puts it in the list of connected services on a profile you use for other things, and makes the resulting subscription visible in places you were not thinking about. A separate email address costs two minutes and keeps the whole thing in one place you can close later. Apple's private relay option, where offered, sits somewhere between the two. A phone number is worth resisting unless it is genuinely required — it is the identifier that follows you across services, and companies use it for far more than sign-in. Our privacy checklist covers what else to look at on this screen, including where conversations are stored and whether deletion is real.
The card, and which checkout you use
Most apps let you in without paying, then present the subscription later. When you do pay, you often have a choice between the app-store checkout and the company's own website, and they are not the same deal. App-store billing costs the developer a commission, so web prices are sometimes lower, and some apps only sell certain tiers on the web at all.
What you get for the higher store price is a subscription you can cancel from one settings screen in a few taps, with a visible renewal date and a refund route that exists. A web subscription is cancelled wherever the company decides, which is usually a link buried in account settings and occasionally an email to support. Our guide to what the tiers actually buy goes through the rest of the pricing picture.
The ten minutes after signing up for an AI girlfriend app
You are in, and the app will immediately try to move you toward a subscription. Do four things before you decide anything.
- Turn off notifications. The prompts are written to pull you back, and you cannot judge whether you enjoy the app while it is interrupting you.
- Find the delete option. Not to use it — to confirm it exists, and to see whether deleting a character also deletes the conversation history and the account.
- Check what the free tier actually holds. Message caps, memory limits and voice minutes are usually listed somewhere unglamorous in settings rather than on the upgrade screen.
- Tell it three specific things you can ask about in a few days. Memory is the feature that separates a good app from a frustrating one, and it cannot be tested in a single conversation.
Then use it for a week before paying, the way our first-week guide sets out. If you want somewhere to run that week, the app we currently recommend is a reasonable starting point.
Where this cuts against signing up at all
Being honest about the trade-off: you now hand over more at the door than you used to, and the people holding it are not only the app. A verification vendor may keep a record that a check happened, the app knows which method you passed, and the payment processor has the rest. Rules written to keep children out of adult services have the side effect of making adults identify themselves to use them, and that tension is not resolved by anything you can click.
What you can control is which route you take. Prefer a store-passed age range if the app accepts one, then a card check, then facial estimation with a stated deletion policy, and treat document upload as the option of last resort. If an app offers only document upload, and you are not comfortable with that, the right answer is to close the tab — there are others, and no companion app is worth handing a passport scan to a company you cannot name.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need ID to sign up for an AI girlfriend app?
Not usually. Most apps satisfy their obligations with a card check, an age range passed by the app store, or a facial age estimate, and document upload tends to appear only where a service hosts explicit material or operates under stricter local rules. Where it is the only option offered, that is a choice the company made rather than a universal requirement.
Can you use an AI companion app anonymously?
Partly. You can keep your real name off the account by using a dedicated email address rather than a social sign-in, and a card check proves your age without revealing much else. Full anonymity is not on offer, because the payment step and the age step both need something real behind them.
Should you sign up through the app store or the website?
The store version is easier to cancel and shows a neutral charge on your statement; the website version is sometimes cheaper and occasionally has tiers the store does not. For a first subscription the store is the safer choice, because the thing you most want at that point is a simple way out.
Disclosure. DreamHeart AI earns a commission if you sign up through the links marked as affiliate links on this page. It does not change what we write. How we earn.