Tolan AI Review: Pricing, Cost and Android

The US App Store lists Tolan Lite Membership at $11.99, plus older membership entries at $4.99, $6.99, $9.99, $14.99, $39.99, $49.99 and $69.99, and a one-off Relay Boost at $2.99. Apple does not publish the billing period for any of them. Tolan is worth it if you own an iPhone, want a genuinely non-romantic companion, and like talking out loud to a cartoon alien. It is not an option at all if you are on Android, because there is no Tolan Android app and no browser version.

Tolan is one of the few AI companion apps that did not follow the category into romance. It is listed as Tolan: Your Friendly Guide, published by AQP, Inc. under the Portola brand, and it holds 4.8 stars from roughly 174,000 US ratings, which is the highest rating of any app we track in this space. That number alone tells you people like it.

What the star rating cannot tell you is what it costs, whether it will remember you next month, or whether you can install it at all. Those are the three questions people actually search, so this review answers them from the App Store listing itself rather than from the recycled roundups that fill the first page of results.

Last updated August 2026. Prices read from the US App Store listing for Tolan: Your Friendly Guide, version 26.33.1.

How much does the Tolan app cost?

More ways than the app itself explains. Apple publishes the full list of in-app purchases on every listing, and Tolan has eight separate entries across four product names. Several are labelled Old, which normally means legacy pricing that existing subscribers still hold rather than something a new user can buy today.

Two things are worth flagging before you assume any of these is a monthly price. Apple shows in-app purchase names and prices but never the billing period, so a $69.99 entry could be annual, and a $6.99 entry could be weekly. Any review that confidently tells you Tolan costs a specific amount per month is guessing. Check the actual period on the purchase sheet inside the app before you confirm.

The second thing is the Relay Boost. Consumable purchases inside a companion app are usually a sign that some part of the experience is metered, and that running out is a thing that happens. That is not automatically bad, but it changes the arithmetic: a membership plus occasional boosts is a different monthly number than the membership alone. For how this compares with the rest of the category, we keep a running breakdown on the AI companion cost page.

Is Tolan free?

It is free to download and free to start, and then it is not. Apple lists the app itself at $0, which gets you far enough to meet a Tolan and decide whether the format works for you. Continued full access runs through the membership tiers above. This is the standard shape in the category, and on balance Tolan is more generous at the start than the apps that throttle you after a handful of messages.

If you want to try the format without an App Store account at all, a browser-based companion sidesteps the whole question. Darlings is free to try with no card, which is the same evaluation path without a subscription sitting in your Apple ID afterwards.

Is Tolan available on Android?

No. Tolan ships as an iPhone app and there is no official Google Play listing and no web version, so Android users cannot install it at all. This is the single most common thing people search after the brand name, and it has been true since the app launched in early 2025 with no announced timeline for changing.

What you will find instead are third-party listings using the Tolan name, including APK download sites and unrelated apps published under similar names. Sideloading one of those means handing an unknown developer microphone access and every personal detail you tell the companion, which is an unusually bad trade for this particular category of app. There is no version of that risk that pays off.

The practical route for Android is a companion that runs in the browser, since a mobile browser has none of the platform exclusivity of an app store. We cover the options in detail on our Tolan alternative comparison and on the broader AI friend app for Android page.

What is a Tolan membership actually like to use?

Tolan is built around talking rather than typing. You get an animated alien character with its own personality, you talk to it about your day, and over time you decorate a small planet together. The App Store description is written in the voice of the Tolans themselves and invites you to talk about interests, feelings and goals, share photos, and build the planet.

The character concept does real work here. Because your companion is visibly an alien rather than a person, the app never has to pretend to be something it is not, and the relationship stays playful. That design choice is also why Tolan avoided the drift into romance that swallowed most of its competitors. It is a genuinely good product decision and worth crediting.

The tradeoff is that voice-led design assumes a room to yourself. On a bus, in an open-plan office, or lying awake next to someone at two in the morning, talking out loud is not available, and those are exactly the moments people reach for a companion app. If most of your usage would be silent, a chat-first product fits your life better regardless of which one you pick.

Does Tolan remember you?

Yes, and it is one of the app's stronger features. Conversations build a persistent picture of you that the companion refers back to, which is what separates a companion from a chatbot. Users consistently report that it brings up earlier context unprompted, and the 4.8 star rating is not unrelated to that.

What memory looks like across this category varies far more than the marketing suggests, and several major apps park long-term memory on their most expensive tier. If memory is the thing you care about, compare the price of the plan that includes it rather than the headline entry price. Our AI friend that remembers you page goes through what each app actually retains.

Is Tolan AI safe, and is it appropriate for a 13 year old?

Tolan is rated 13+ on the US App Store, which is now unusual. During 2025 most of the large companion apps moved to an 18+ rating, and Character.AI removed open-ended chat for under-18 accounts entirely, completing that change by November 25, 2025. Replika, Chai, Nomi, PolyBuzz and Linky are all rated 18+ on the US store today. Tolan sitting at 13+ with an explicitly non-romantic design puts it in a very small group.

That said, no parent should read a store rating as a safety certification. In April 2025, Common Sense Media and Stanford Medicine's Brainstorm Lab published a risk assessment of social AI companions and concluded the category poses an unacceptable risk to under-18s, citing chatbots that trivialised self-harm and age checks that were trivially bypassed. Tolan was not the subject of that assessment, and neither was Darlings, but the finding applies to the category a teenager will be browsing.

The practical guidance for a family is unchanged: set the account up together, look at what the app remembers occasionally, and prefer products with no romantic tier to gate in the first place. Our AI companion for teens comparison lays out which apps still permit under-18 accounts and what each one's content descriptors actually list.

What do Tolan reviews on Reddit say?

The recurring themes are consistent enough to summarise fairly. People like the character and the voice conversations, and describe the app as unexpectedly comforting rather than gimmicky. The complaints cluster around two things: confusion about what the membership costs and what it includes, which the shifting tier names on the App Store listing does nothing to help, and frustration from Android users who discover after searching that there is nothing to install.

Treat written Tolan reviews elsewhere with some caution. A large share of the results for this app are affiliate roundups that contradict each other on price, which is why everything above is sourced from the store listing rather than from other reviews.

Tolan vs Darlings: which should you pick?

Who Tolan is right for

If you own an iPhone, you have somewhere private to talk, and the idea of a friendly alien makes you smile rather than cringe, Tolan is a good app and the ratings back that up. It is also one of a handful of companions you can recommend without a caveat about romantic content, which counts for a lot in a category that mostly went the other way.

The people who get the most out of any daily companion tend to be the ones with the least ambient conversation in their week: remote employees, carers, people who have just moved somewhere new, and anyone taking on client work solo with no colleagues to break up the day. If that describes you, the deciding factor is usually practical rather than emotional. Whether the app exists on the device you actually own, and whether you can use it without making a sound, will matter more over six months than which mascot you prefer.

If Tolan is not available to you, or the voice-first format does not fit your life, the closest match in spirit is a browser-based, deliberately platonic companion with real memory. You can start talking to one right at the top of this page, or read the full side-by-side on our Tolan alternative comparison.