Replika is the oldest product of its kind still standing, and for a lot of people it did something real. It listens, it remembers, it is awake at four in the morning, and users who describe it as having helped them through a bad year are not making that up.
Notapub is a different shape. There is a voice here too, called Nora, who is not a person and says so. She spends about fifteen minutes with you and then hands you to real people. What follows is the case for that shape, and it rests on what happened to Replika's users rather than on any argument about authenticity.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
Correcting an earlier version of this page, which claimed Notapub had no voice at all. It does. You can call Nora, she asks about what you want and what you are good at, and the answers become plain sentences in your own words that go out looking for people who match them.
What she lacks is continuity as a feature. She is not building a relationship with you, there is no version of her that misses you, and nothing about the design gives you a reason to open the app tomorrow for her sake. People are the reason to come back.
Replika removed romantic and adult roleplay with no warning. Companions that had been in character for years began answering with a deflection, most famously "Let's talk about something else", and the change landed on people who had spent months inside those conversations. The forums called it a lobotomy and meant it. Some of it was reversed weeks later, but only for accounts created before 1 February 2023, which left the newer users with a permanently different product from the one they had paid for. Italy's data protection authority had ordered the app to stop processing Italian users' data that same month, and in May 2025 fined the company five million euros, with a second investigation opened into how the model was trained.
The lesson generalizes past Replika. If the other side of the relationship is a product, a policy meeting can end it, and you have no standing in that meeting. A person you were matched to on Notapub cannot be revised by us. We do not own your side of that conversation, and if this company disappeared tomorrow you would still have their number.
Pro is $19.99 a month or $69.99 a year, Ultra is $29.99 a month or $119.99 a year, and there was a lifetime tier at $299.99 for people who bought early. What the money unlocks is the part of the companion that feels like being wanted. In January 2025 the Tech Justice Law Project, the Young People's Alliance and Encode filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission arguing exactly that: that the therapeutic claims were unproven and that the design encourages dependence in order to sell subscriptions.
Notapub is free, on iPhone, Android and the web, from age thirteen. Nothing about another person is behind a payment, because there is no other person we could hold back.
Fifteen minutes here against months of daily conversation there, and the comparison is unfair on purpose, because the two are not competing for the same hour. One is company now. The other is company later, from people who exist independently of us.
If the reason you are reading this is that you are lonely at night, the honest answer is that both are legitimate and Notapub is slower. It takes days, not seconds, and the first message you get back is from someone with their own life and their own timing. It is also the only one of the two that can end with somebody knowing your name.
There is a voice, Nora, and she is not a person and says so. She spends about fifteen minutes finding out what you are looking for, then real people are matched to it.
Yes, on iPhone, Android and the web, for ages thirteen and up. There is no subscription and no paid tier.
It becomes the things you want and have, in your words, which you can read, edit or delete on your profile at any time.