Earning 8.8 million US dollars in half a year, this Chinese company has secured a top-four spot on the global AI revenue ranking with its "AI Boyfriend" offering.
In mid-July 2026, overseas tech media Decrypt cited a report from data analytics firm Appfigures Intelligence, showing that since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, there have been approximately 214 NSFW and romantic companion AI applications worldwide (on both App Store and Google Play), with total downloads exceeding 165.3 million times, and total global user consumption reaching 427.3 million U.S. dollars (revenue before platform commission, equivalent to about 2.9 billion RMB at the current exchange rate). Judging by the performance of the past six months, these applications collectively generated 162.8 million U.S. dollars (about 1.14 billion RMB) in revenue in the first half of 2026. Among them, the downloads of non-NSFW AI companion applications in the first half of 2026 were almost twice that of romantic applications, but their revenue scale was almost on a par — non-NSFW APPs generated 164.8 million U.S. dollars in revenue, and NSFW/romantic APPs generated 162.8 million U.S. dollars.
These figures mean that AI companion/chat products have become mature consumer products that users are willing to pay for. The high ARPU users who are willing to spend real money are mostly concentrated in the more segmented track of "anthropomorphic romantic companionship".
According to the TOP5 ranking of Appfigures' half-year revenue list, the highest-grossing product is Zeta, reaching 33 million U.S. dollars, followed by Tipsy Chat (15.2 million U.S. dollars), ChatBox: AI Chat Bot Assistant (13 million U.S. dollars), Crushie AI (8.8 million U.S. dollars) and Emochi (7.5 million U.S. dollars). These products almost monopolize about 47% of the total revenue in the AI companion/chat track in the first half of 2026.
In this list, in addition to Tipsy Chat and Emochi that we have already analyzed, Crushie AI has also attracted our high attention. The company behind this product is shown as SoulZ AI Inc., and the distribution entity on the Google Play side is Qianfan Hong Kong Limited. But judging from the product form, it can be judged that this product is developed by a domestic Chinese mainland overseas development team.
(Crushie AI web homepage 丨 Source: Crushie AI official website)
AI Companion Targeted at Female Users
Earned 8 million U.S. Dollars Just Through Conversations?
From the perspective of product form first, Crushie AI has a very clear positioning, which is to focus on immersive AI emotional companionship. Although the product does not strictly limit the gender of the characters, according to the introduction on the store homepage and the materials crawled by DataEye, its current promotion focuses more on "AI boyfriend", which means its current strategy is still mainly targeting female users.
(The app description in Google Play Store focuses more on AI boyfriend 丨 Source: Google Play)
This positioning is clearly different from Tipsy Chat's novel creation mode and PolyByz's focus on IP characters.
Specifically, the core gameplay and features of Crushie AI include the following items:
Personalized Character Creation: Users can customize the personality, background and memory of their AI boyfriend. The personality dimensions can be freely combined according to user preferences, which is mainly realized through text description.
(Character creation interface supports a large number of settings, and MBTI can also be set by users 丨 Source: Crushie AI)
Continuous Emotional Companionship: Based on AI conversations, one of the distinctive features of Crushie AI is that it can learn from users' conversations, remember things that are important to users, and keep growing over time.
Visual Storytelling: Use text + special emotion/action commands to create an atmosphere and build an "interactive romantic experience". In conversations, Crushie will use action commands, font color and font size changes to create a sense of scene for users. For example, when the author chats with the AI character Ethan, his replies use gray text as narration and black text as dialogue. At the same time, the dialog box also displays the favorability level, current scene and the emotion of the AI character, making the experience more like an AVG game.
(Action commands can be issued directly in conversations, and the dialog box contains rich information 丨 Source: Crushie AI)
Private and Secure Space: The app explicitly emphasizes that conversations are private and will not be judged.
In general, Crushie AI has relatively convergent core functions with similar products. However, as it focuses on "one-on-one nurturing, growing with every interaction" and "AI boyfriend", it has formed a distinct differentiation from other products that focus on role-playing, murder mystery games, and AI chat companions. This design exactly hits the payment psychology of "nurturing" that has been repeatedly verified in the game industry: users do not pay for a one-time or weekly disposable conversation experience, but for a continuous sense of experience.
High Pricing, but Users Are Willing to Pay for Emotional Value
As we mentioned earlier, according to Appfigures' statistics, Crushie AI generated 88 million U.S. dollars in revenue (before commission on both app stores) in the first half of 2026, equivalent to about 60 million RMB, while the "regular" on the list Emochi only generated 75 million U.S. dollars in revenue.
However, compared with the total revenue, its growth rate is more noteworthy.
AppGobin data shows that Crushie AI's weekly download growth trend on the Android side is "above average", with the number of daily downloads and active users exceeding 10,000 for many times, and the number of new downloads in the last 4 weeks is about 98,000. As of August 2026, the total downloads on Google Play have exceeded 500,000, with a stable rating between 4.24 and 4.5 stars. On the App Store side, Crushie AI exceeded 250,000 downloads in April 2026.
(Crushie AI's daily downloads and active users on Google Play have exceeded 10,000 for many times 丨 Source: AppGobin)
As of August 2026, its monthly active users are only 345,000, which is the lowest among the 5 products mentioned above. However, according to the feedback from the data platform, each active user can contribute about 30 RMB per month, which is the highest among the 5 products. For example, compared with PolyBuzz, PolyBuzz's monthly active users are 42 times that of Crushie AI, but its ARPU value is lower than that of Crushie AI.
On the one hand, this is a great affirmation of Crushie AI's positioning strategy, and on the other hand, it is attributed to Crushie AI's payment design and continuous iteration capability.
In terms of payment, Crushie AI follows a typical path of "subscription + high-unit-price gift packs", with the subscription price of only 29.99 U.S. dollars per month, but there are many types of gift packs with various prices, and the price of gems ranges from 2.49 U.S. dollars to 99.99 U.S. dollars. By comparison, for example, Tipsy Chat offers 1000 gems for 5.9 HKD, about 0.76 U.S. dollars per 1000 gems. In addition, Crushie AI's 29.99 U.S. dollars per month subscription price is even higher than that of Character.AI (9.99 U.S. dollars per month) and Replika (19.99 U.S. dollars per month). All these reflect Crushie AI's product positioning and monetization capability of "high ARPU per user".
(Partial gift pack pricing of Crushie AI 丨 Source: AppRank)
From the perspective of product launch rhythm, since Crushie AI was first launched on both Google Play and iOS in February 2025, it has maintained high-frequency iteration — as of August 2026, the latest version has been updated to v2.2.1, with 44 version records, and the iteration rhythm is almost close to once a month.
(Crushie AI has iterated 44 versions since its launch 丨 Source: AppRank)
It is worth noting that almost all such applications adopt the conversation points payment mechanism. Since Crushie AI has no additional payment items such as AI image generation, AI video generation, etc. (that is, the payment items are single), its conversation payment pricing is relatively higher. The key concerns of high-score users are immersion and sense of reality, most of the positive reviewers think that Crushie AI has natural conversations and rich emotions, while low-score users mainly focus on memory issues and conversation costs. We noticed that some users reported that Crushie AI does not display the points balance on the conversation page, nor does it prompt when points are about to run out, so users may not be able to reply after carefully preparing a long reply due to insufficient points, which greatly affects the user experience (the author also confirmed that there is no points display on Crushie AI after personal experience). It remains to be seen whether Crushie AI will solve these problems in subsequent versions.
(Partial user reviews of Crushie AI 丨 Source: AppRank)
However, at least judging from the results of the revenue list, Crushie AI can already be regarded as having successfully verified the segmented track of "high-ARPU female-oriented AI boyfriend", demonstrating a possibility for Chinese AI overseas teams in the AI companion track. We are also very curious whether more segmented AI companion products will emerge in the future.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Sail Overseas", author: Wang Jiang, published with authorization from 36Kr.