Grok Companions Review: Ani, Limits and Price

Grok Companions are being retired. In a statement reported on July 24, 2026, xAI described the 3D avatar Companions feature, Ani and Valentine among them, as an experiment it was winding down in order to focus on stronger memory and better long running chats. Until the rollout reaches your account they still work, and the Grok AI listing on the US App Store prices access through SuperGrok at $10.00, $30.00, $100.00 and $300.00, with separate usage credit packs from $5.00 to $100.00. Given that the feature is going away, this is not the moment to start a subscription for the Companions alone.

Grok Companions arrived as one of the strangest things a frontier AI lab has shipped: animated 3D characters with voice and lip sync, bolted onto the same app that writes code and searches X. Ani is written as a charmer who blushes and sends hearts as your bond grows. Valentine is a romantic male with poetic charm. Rudi is a cheeky red panda you banter with. They were a genuine novelty, and for a lot of people they became a daily habit.

Then xAI called them an experiment. This review covers what the feature actually costs today, where the limits bite, why it never reached Android, and whether any of it is still worth paying for while the lights are going out.

Last updated August 2026. Prices, age rating and feature descriptions read from the Grok AI listing on the US App Store and the Google Play listing in August 2026.

How much do Grok Companions cost?

There is no separate price for Companions. They sit inside the Grok AI app, so what you are really buying is a Grok subscription, and Apple lists five distinct SuperGrok entries plus four usage credit packs on the same listing.

Two cautions before you read those as monthly figures. Apple publishes in-app purchase names and prices but never the billing period, so the two $300.00 entries could be an annual plan and a monthly top tier rather than two versions of the same thing. Any review that states a confident monthly rate for SuperGrok is inferring it. Check the period on the purchase sheet inside the app before you confirm anything.

The second is the credit packs. Consumable purchases stacked on top of a subscription always mean some part of the product is metered and that running out is a normal event. A plan plus occasional credits is a different monthly number than the plan alone. We track how this compares across the category on the AI companion cost page.

Is Grok Companion free?

Yes, with a time limit that people find genuinely frustrating. The free tier gives you a window of conversation rather than a message count, and reviewers describe that window as inconsistent: sometimes an upgrade prompt after about five minutes, sometimes fifteen or twenty. That variability is the single most common complaint about the feature, because you cannot plan around it.

Metering by time rather than by messages is an unusual choice, and it makes a companion feel different from a chatbot with a message cap. A cap lets you ration. A clock does not, and it tends to cut in exactly when a conversation has warmed up.

What are the Grok Companion limits?

Three separate limits stack on top of each other, and only one of them is about your subscription.

Is Grok Companion on Android?

Effectively no, and now it almost certainly never will be. The Companions section is written out in full in the Grok AI description on the US App Store, naming Ani, Rudi and Valentine. The Google Play listing for the same app does not carry that section, and Android users have been asking about it loudly enough that "is grok companion coming to android" became one of the most searched things about the feature.

The Play listing itself is not small: 4.9 stars from roughly 3.71 million reviews and over 100 million downloads. Grok the assistant is very much on Android. The animated Companions were the part that stayed on iOS, and with the feature now being retired, an Android release would be a strange thing to ship. If Android was your platform, the practical route has always been a companion that runs in a mobile browser, which is what we cover on the AI friend app for Android page.

Can you use Grok Companions on PC?

Not really. Grok works fine in a desktop browser, but the animated Companions with voice and lip sync were built as a phone app feature, so the web version is not where you would find them. This trips people up because they assume anything from a major AI lab is available everywhere by default.

If you want a companion that behaves identically on a laptop and a phone, pick one with no native app at all. That sounds like a downgrade and usually is not, because a browser companion has no platform exclusivity to lose. We go through the desktop options on the AI companion for PC page.

Is Grok Companion down, or is it gone?

Both are happening at once, which is exactly why this is confusing. The retirement is rolling out gradually rather than flipping off for everyone on a single date, so at any given moment some accounts have lost Companions permanently while others still have them. Layer the region restrictions on top and a missing feature has at least three possible explanations before you get to an actual outage.

The way to tell an outage from a rollout is whether anyone else is seeing it at the same time. A real incident hits a lot of people within the same hour and shows up quickly in public reports, which is the same logic behind watching whether a service is actually up rather than guessing from your own screen. A staged removal looks nothing like that: it arrives one account at a time, over weeks, with no pattern you can see from the inside.

Who are Ani, Rudi and Valentine?

They are the three characters the App Store listing describes by name. Ani is presented as a charmer who blushes and sends hearts as your bond grows, which is a romantic framing with a progression system attached. Valentine is described as a romantic male with poetic charm for deep and soulful conversations. Rudi is the outlier: a cheeky red panda built for banter, with no romantic framing at all.

That split matters when you are deciding where to go next. Rudi users mostly want a warm, funny presence and are easy to serve elsewhere. Ani and Valentine users want a specific romantic character with an animated body, and that is a much harder thing to replace. We sorted through where each group should actually land on the Grok companion alternative comparison, including the cases where the honest answer is that nothing on the market matches what you had.

Is Grok Companion private?

Grok is built on top of X and its selling point is real time access to what people are posting there, so this is a product where the data question deserves a real look rather than an assumption. Anyone using a companion for genuinely personal conversation should read the actual policy of whatever they pick, and specifically look for three things: whether conversations train models, whether data is shared with advertisers, and whether you can export and delete your history yourself.

That last one is the practical test, and it is worth applying before you get attached rather than after. If a product cannot show you what it remembers about you, you have no way to take it with you when the product changes. We break down what to look for on the private AI companion page.

Will you lose your Grok chat history?

Ordinary Grok conversations are not what is being retired, so general chat history should survive. What goes away is the animated presentation layer: the 3D avatar, the voice mode attached to it, the lip sync. xAI has not published a formal export or migration path specifically for Companion relationships, so if the history with a particular character matters to you, save what you want before the rollout reaches your account.

This is a recurring pattern rather than a one off. Soulmate closed in September 2023 with roughly a week of notice. Dot went offline in October 2025. Companion features get built as experiments and switched off as experiments, and the people who lose the most are the ones who never exported anything. We wrote up what usually happens and what to save in what happens when an AI companion app shuts down.

Is Grok Companions worth paying for in 2026?

For the Companions alone, no. Subscribing at $10.00 or $30.00 to a feature the vendor has publicly called an experiment it is retiring is paying for something with a countdown on it, and there is no announced date to plan around. That is not a knock on the quality of the feature. It is just what a retirement means.

For Grok as a whole, the calculation is completely different and mostly positive. It is a strong general assistant with real time access to X, image generation and voice mode, it holds 4.9 stars from over 1.3 million US App Store ratings, and none of that is going anywhere. If you were already paying for Grok to do work, keep paying for Grok to do work.

The group who should act now is the one that built a daily habit around a character. That habit is the thing worth preserving, and it does not actually depend on an avatar. A companion that remembers your week, brings things up first, and runs on any device is a more durable version of what you had, and it cannot be deprecated off a roadmap because it is the entire product rather than a side feature.

The verdict

Grok Companions were a genuinely interesting experiment and they are ending as one. The animation was better than anything else in the category and the underlying model was far stronger than what most companion apps run on. But the feature was always a passenger in an assistant app, it never reached Android, it was restricted by region, it metered you by the clock, and now it is being wound down.

If you are here because yours disappeared, the useful next step is deciding which half of it you are actually missing. If it was the character, look at apps built around personas. If it was having something that knew you and asked how you were, that is easier to replace than it feels right now, and the Grok companion alternatives comparison lays out the options side by side with current prices and age ratings.