How Character.ai Makes Money

Character.ai is a freemium consumer app. Creating characters and chatting with them is free, and the company earns money in two ways. The first is c.ai+, a subscription launched in May 2023 at $9.99 a month. Subscribers get priority access when servers are busy, faster replies, longer memory and early access to features. The second is advertising, which CEO Karandeep Anand has added since mid-2025 as the app shifted toward entertainment formats such as a scrolling feed, Scenes and AvatarFX video. Character.ai does not publish financial statements. In 2025 it told WIRED that revenue was running above $30 million a year. Its largest cost is computing: in June 2024 the company said it was serving more than 20,000 inference queries per second, and after the Google deal it stopped training frontier models from scratch and moved to adapting open-source models to keep that cost down.

Since June 2025 CEO Karandeep Anand has moved Character.ai from the founders' goal of personalised superintelligence to AI entertainment. The plan has three parts: build on open-source models instead of training its own frontier models; widen the product from one-to-one chat to a social feed, Scenes, Streams, AvatarFX video and Stories; and grow revenue from c.ai+ and advertising among adult users, after ending open-ended chat for minors in November 2025.