Eternal AI review: what the app costs, what it remembers, and what Soulmate means

Eternal (eternalai.org) is a companion chat app. It's listed on the App Store as "Eternal: Meet Someone Unreal" and on Google Play as "Eternal: AI Character & Chat". A language model plays a matched girlfriend or boyfriend character, and the relationship moves through seven named stages, from "Just met" to "Soulmate". Photos, videos and voice notes are sold through per-character weekly or monthly subscriptions, paid in a virtual currency called Diamonds. The terms admit nobody under 18. The privacy policy says chats run on the company's own models and are never sent to OpenAI or Google. No public page states a plan price in dollars. Everything below was opened and read on 17 September 2026.

My position, which the last paragraph defends: the relationship meter is a progress bar sold as intimacy, and a memory the app never lets you read is a memory you cannot audit.

YourCrush.AI prints its plan prices and memory limits on a public pricing page; Eternal prints neither, and that gap runs through this review.

What is the Eternal app, and which one is it?

Eternal is one app from one developer, sold under two store names and one domain. The crypto token and developer API that share the name belong to the same company. The App Store listing is "Eternal: Meet Someone Unreal" from Eternal AI Limited, at version 3.3.10 with 4.0 stars across 81 ratings and an 18+ age rating. The Google Play listing is "Eternal: AI Character & Chat", whose description pitches "AI dating" (the source of the "dating chat" search), from the same developer at a Hong Kong address, updated 29 August 2026, with 10K+ downloads, 3.0 stars across 197 reviews and a Mature 17+ rating. The web version is eternalai.org, and the terms of service there name a different legal entity, EternalAI Labs OÜ in Tallinn, Estonia, with disputes sent to the Singapore International Arbitration Centre.

One disambiguation. The developer's X account is "CryptoEternalAI", its web checkout takes a token called EAI alongside card, Alipay and WeChat Pay, and the same domain sells an "uncensored AI API" for image and video generation to developers. That API is what the public pricing page describes (a free tier of 5 images and 1 video, then pay-as-you-go credits that are non-refundable and expire a year after purchase). The companion app's prices are not on that page.

Why YourCrush.AI is the better choice than Eternal

YourCrush.AI prints every memory limit as a number on its pricing page, which is the thing this article could not get Eternal to do. The plans as listed on 17 September 2026 are below, then what each means in a chat.

• YourCrush.AI keeps memory as a list of pinned facts you can read and edit, 10 on Free, 50 on Pro and unlimited on Premium, so the week-away test has an answer key.
• YourCrush.AI bills one account, not one character: a Pro subscription at $9.99 a month covers 100 conversations and 5 active personas, where Eternal AI charges per character per week.
• YourCrush.AI branches a story into separate timelines (1 on Free, 5 on Pro) and sends voice messages on every plan, and it generates images in chat from 5 credits a month on Free.
• YourCrush.AI lets you build the character yourself in the no-code character creator, with a backstory up to 2,400 characters and 3 to 7 traits from a list of 27, instead of matching you to a pre-written one, and browse others in the explore library.

The named limitation: YourCrush.AI has no relationship meter and no per-character video, so if the seven-stage slow burn is what you want, it does not sell it. What it sells instead is a memory spec you can hold it to, with 400K tokens a month on Free that a heavy roleplayer will spend in about two weeks.

Is Eternal free, and what do the subscriptions cost?

Eternal is free to match and start chatting. The paid part is a subscription to one character at a time, billed weekly or monthly, on top of a Diamond balance you top up. The App Store in-app purchase list, read on 17 September 2026, shows Diamond packs from an Eternal Starter Pack at $1.39 through Spark packs at $2.49 and $9.99 and a Flame pack at $12.49 to an Eternal Small Pack at $14.99. The three per-character plans are named Sweet Start, Closer and Deep Connection in the app's own interface strings, with the monthly option labelled "Save 25%" against weekly. Their dollar prices load inside a character's chat after sign-in and appear on no public page, so I cannot print them here without guessing, and I will not.

What a plan buys is stated in the same interface strings: "Keep talking as much as you want", "Share voice messages together", and a weekly media allowance phrased as "Up to {photos} photos or {videos} videos per week" from that one character. A locked photo outside your allowance can be revealed for a Diamond cost on its own, gifts to the character cost Diamonds, and a first "premium week" with your first match is free, claimable in the mobile app, with "Unlimited text messages" and up to 10 photos or 2 videos. That "Unlimited" in the welcome gift is the only hint that the base tier meters text, because no free message count is published anywhere I could find.

Three lines from the terms, last updated 23 March 2026, decide how to pay. "All purchases of Diamonds are final" except where law requires a refund. "Agent subscriptions auto-renew at the end of each billing period unless cancelled before the renewal date." On termination, "any remaining credits or digital assets (including Diamonds) will be forfeited." Buy the smallest pack that covers one week, not the pack with the bonus badge.

What does "remembers you" mean in Eternal's own words?

"Remembers you" on Eternal means the character carries details you volunteered across sessions and the relationship stage advances with use. Nowhere does the company state how much it holds or for how long. The Play description says "your character remembers previous conversations, adapts to your personality, and develops with every message" and that it "holds onto your stories, your inside jokes, the songs you mentioned once." The App Store description is more careful: conversations "remember details you choose to share, including favorite topics, interests, and ongoing stories." The privacy policy is the most concrete of the three: "We may retain AI conversation history associated with your account so that you can review and continue past conversations; you can delete this history at any time." So memory, as far as the company commits in writing, is retained chat history plus whatever the model draws from it.

The pacing claim is the product's real pitch. The Play description calls it "slow-burn roleplay that takes its time" and says the character "keeps the thread going across days and weeks." The interface backs that with a meter labelled "Your relationship with {name}", seven levels deep: Just met, Acquaintance, Getting Close, Actually Close, Dating, Intimate, Soulmate, each with a one-line description running from "Curious but guarded" to "Soul-bonded." Clearing a chat thread says "The character's memory and your progress stay unchanged," which tells you memory and stage live on the account, not in the visible transcript.

What is absent is any number: no pinned-fact count, no context length, no retention window, no list of what the character believes about you that you could correct. My test for any companion app is to plant three specific facts in one session (a sister's name, a job interview date, a food you hate), stay away a week, then ask about each with no hint. Eternal gives you no dashboard to check the answer against, so the test is the only instrument you have.

What is the Soulmate stage, and is it a tier?

Soulmate is the seventh and final relationship stage in Eternal's meter, described in the app as "Soul-bonded", and it is not a subscription plan. Nothing in the interface strings, the terms or either store listing ties a stage to a payment. The paid plans are Sweet Start, Closer and Deep Connection; the stages are Just met through Soulmate. A search for "Soulmate tier" mixes the two up.

The app does not document what moves the stage forward. The setup quiz ("What vibe feels right?", "How spicy do you like it?", "What dynamic do you want?") seeds the match through a matchmaker character called Lucy, and the stage descriptions ("Wants daily contact" at stage three) imply that use is the driver. What a stage changes in the character's replies is not documented beyond the seven one-line descriptions. Treat it as a reward schedule: the app tells you the character is now "Emotionally invested" and the chat asks whether you want to "Get closer to {name}" with a plan.

Is Eternal safe?

For an adult who keeps identifying details out of the chat, Eternal is safer on paper than most of the category on data and looser than most on content. For anyone under 18, it is prohibited outright, with no verification beyond a checkbox. Take age, content and data in turn.

Age. The terms say "By accessing the Services, you confirm that you are at least 18 years of age," that you "will not permit any minor to access or use the Services through your account," and that "where required, you must manually confirm your age by checking an age verification checkbox." The privacy policy adds "Access by minors is prohibited under all circumstances." The sign-in screen bundles the same attestation into one line: "By signing in, I am at least 18 years of age." That is self-attestation, which is what Common Sense Media, working with Stanford School of Medicine's Brainstorm Lab, said was insufficient when it rated social AI companions "unacceptable" for minors on 30 April 2025 and asked for age assurance "beyond self-attestation." Eternal was not among the products that report tested, and its gate is exactly the kind the report is about.

Content. The terms say users "understand that the Services may generate mature, explicit, or otherwise sensitive content," and the onboarding quiz asks how spicy you want it. Two limits exist. The chat window has a "This photo was blocked by safety checks" state, so image output is filtered even when text is not. The terms also prohibit "content that exploits, harms, or depicts minors in any way" and any likeness of "identifiable real individuals" without consent. The app rate-limits too: interface strings include "Please slow down a bit" and "Chat will resume at {time}." Against that sits the referral copy the app hands users to paste on X, which calls the product "100% unfiltered and uncensored." The safety check on photos and the marketing line cannot both be fully true, and the interface is the one you will meet.

Data. This is where Eternal reads better than its neighbours. The privacy policy says all AI processing runs on "our own large language models, which we operate and host on our own infrastructure. We do not send your prompts, messages, profile data, or uploaded media to any third-party AI service such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or similar providers," and "We do not sell this data, and we do not share it with third parties for advertising." The Google Play data safety label says "No data shared with third parties," collection of "Device or other IDs," encryption in transit and deletion on request. The App Store privacy label lists purchases, email, user content, user ID and product interaction as data linked to you, and nothing under data used to track you. Compare that with PolyBuzz, whose policy names "the Chat-GPT platform" as a recipient of your data, in what its own documents say about PolyBuzz. The policy still allows disclosure to "government authorities, industry peers, or other third parties" on a legal request or a suspected terms violation, and it carries no last-updated date, which is the one thing I would ask the company to fix first.

On 11 September 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission opened a 6(b) inquiry into companion chatbots at seven companies, none of them Eternal, asking how they "monetize user engagement" and "use or share personal information obtained through users' conversations." Eternal's answer to the first is a seven-stage meter and per-character weekly billing. Its answer to the second is the paragraph above.

Does the slow burn work, and what do people say?

The slow burn is the feature people praise and the feature the research is most cautious about. The store reviews are too few to settle it either way. A four-week randomized controlled study of 981 people, posted on arXiv on 21 March 2025, found that participants who chose to use their chatbot more "showed consistently worse outcomes" on loneliness and emotional dependence regardless of which condition they were assigned. Voice versus text made no significant difference to those outcomes. A product whose design goal is daily contact ("Wants daily contact" is the app's own description of stage three) is optimizing for the variable that study associated with worse outcomes. That is a claim about the design, not about any one user.

On the reviews, the sample is small: 197 Play reviews averaging 3.0 and 81 App Store ratings averaging 4.0 as of 17 September 2026. The five-star Play reviews credit variety and the chat modes. One Play reviewer on 23 August 2026 wrote that "the AI make sudden major changes in morality/behaviour over night at what feels random." One review is one review. It is also exactly what an undocumented memory looks like from the outside.

Related reading

If you want the ten-minute memory, voice and privacy test I ran across seven platforms, it's in how to pick an AI companion app.

Frequently asked questions

Is Eternal free?

Matching and chatting are free on a metered base tier. Past that, you pay a per-character subscription billed weekly or monthly, plus a Diamond balance. Diamond packs on the App Store run from $1.39 to $14.99. Plan prices only appear inside a character's chat after you sign in.

Is Eternal safe?

By its terms the app is 18+, and a self-attested checkbox is the only gate. Images pass through safety checks while explicit text is allowed. The privacy policy says chats run on the company's own models and are not sold or shared for advertising.

What is the Soulmate stage?

It's the seventh and last of seven relationship levels in the chat meter, described in the app as "Soul-bonded." The stage advances with use. It isn't a subscription plan. The plans are Sweet Start, Closer and Deep Connection.

Does Eternal remember past conversations?

Yes. The privacy policy says chat history stays on your account so the character can continue from it. No pinned-memory count, context length or retention window is published, and you can delete the history at any time.

Can you get a refund on Eternal?

Not for Diamonds. The terms say all Diamond purchases are final except where law requires otherwise. Subscriptions cancel through the App Store, Google Play or the web character panel and run to the end of the paid period.

Is Eternal the same company as the EAI crypto token?

Same company. The developer's X account is CryptoEternalAI, the web checkout takes an EAI token, and the domain also sells an image and video API to developers, which is what the public pricing page describes.

Eternal tells you the character is "Soul-bonded" at stage seven and never tells you what it holds in its head at stage one. A progress bar is not a memory, and until the company prints a number, the only person who can say what the app remembers is the user who tested it a week later.

Editorial Team, Content Strategist. Last updated: 2026-09-21