Show HN: The Companion Lab – What 7 AI companion apps charge on bank statements

Seven apps. Seven merchant names we read off our own card notices, each with the amount and the date. If a line on your statement looks like one of these, this is the page that tells you what it is.

None of these apps bill under the name you see on their website. That is the whole trick of it: you pay for something called Candy or Ourdream, and the bank hands you a string like NDAI.CC. We paid for seven subscriptions in October 2026 and photographed each notice before cancelling. Below is what each one actually said.

The least discreet of the seven. It does not say Candy, but it does say candy.ai, so anyone who reads the line and searches it lands on the app.

Charged $9.99 on 20 October 2026. EverAI Limited, registered in Malta.

Middle of the group. It does not spell out Ourdream, but Dream Studio is close enough that the app is easy to identify.

Charged $19.99 on 19 October 2026. Dream Studio USA, Inc.; the notice points to Limassol, Cyprus.

The most discreet of the seven that are not obviously the app. Nothing in the string suggests an AI companion app.

Charged $19.99 on 19 October 2026. Secret Labs Inc., Dover, Delaware.

Very discreet on its own. NDAI.CC means nothing to someone who has not seen it before.

Charged $19.95 on 20 October 2026. NextDay AI, Montreal, Delaware and Limassol.

Very discreet. Like NDAI.CC it only resolves if you already know what it is.

Charged $15.00 on 20 October 2026. NextDay AI, Montreal, Delaware and Limassol.

Close to Candy: it names the app's own web address, so it identifies itself to anyone who reads it.

Charged $12.99 on 20 October 2026. DreamGF, with the notice showing Romania.

Names the site outright, so it is not discreet at all.

Charged $24.99 on 20 October 2026. Xotic Tech OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia.

SpicyChat and GirlfriendGPT both produced a notice carrying 514-2860020, with NDAI.CCand NDAI.CHAT in front of it. They are the same company, NextDay AI, listed in Montreal, Delaware and Limassol. They are not the same subscription: both were charged on the same evening in our test, and cancelling one left the other running until we cancelled it too.

If you are looking at a charge from this pair, the domain after NDAI is how you tell them apart. A phone number on a statement is also the fastest way to query a charge without hunting for the app first.

These are seven charges we made ourselves, all in October 2026, all on the same card. Merchant names change when a company switches payment processor, so a charge you see next year may read differently. Where we quote a site's own promise about its statement name, we say so and label it as the site's claim; where we quote a descriptor, it is from the notice we photographed.

We cancelled every one of these subscriptions during the test. The pages linked above have the full reviews, including what each app costs after the first month, which is the number that catches people out.

The longer article covers what these charges add up to once you include coins, Moments and tokens:what an AI girlfriend app really costs.