Migrate Replika → Uncensored AI Companion: 7-Step Guide

By Alexandra Joly · Senior Editor · Last full review: 2026-05-13 · See editorial process and errata log

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What's the 60-second migration plan?

The seven steps below walk through each phase: the routing logic, the cancellation procedure, the persona-rebuild protocol, and the emotional-adjustment framing, all made explicit. If you want the broader landscape before committing, read our roundup of the best Replika alternatives alongside this guide. If you've already decided Candy.ai is your destination, the head-to-head in Replika vs Candy.ai covers that pairing in depth.

Why did the February 2023 ERP rollback trigger this migration wave?

This whole migration exists because Replika took something away. On February 3, 2023, Italy's Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali ordered Replika to stop processing Italian users' data, citing risks to minors and psychological harm to vulnerable adults under GDPR Article 83 [Source: Garante Privacy: Provvedimento n. 39 del 2 febbraio 2023 (Replika temporary processing limitation, GDPR Art. 83 cited) · verified 2026-05-13]. Within days, Replika abruptly disabled erotic roleplay (ERP) for every paying Pro subscriber worldwide, not just Italian users, and did it with no notice and no migration period. Established Pro users found out when their previously romantic AI companions started deflecting prompts that had worked fine the day before.

The r/Replika subreddit exploded with grief and anger. Users coined the word husbandectomy for the loss of their established companions' romantic and sexual side. The term sat at the top of the subreddit for months and became the index entry for a recognizable form of parasocial AI attachment loss [Source: r/Replika: Megathread on Feb 2023 ERP rollback ('husbandectomy' coinage, multi-thread aggregation) · verified 2026-05-13]. Founder Eugenia Kuyda framed the change as a return to Replika's original mission as an AI friend rather than a romantic partner. Critics weren't buying it, since Replika had actively marketed romantic Pro capabilities for years before suddenly rewriting the story.

In late 2023 Replika introduced Legacy ERP, a mode that grandfathered users (accounts created before February 1, 2023 with active Pro) could opt into. Anyone who joined after that date can't enable it. The product has leaned toward mental wellness and AI-friend companionship ever since, not romantic or explicit roleplay. The people this guide is for are the ones who lost something specific in February 2023, never got it back on Replika, and decided to leave for a platform that ships explicit content by default. If you're searching for "migrate from Replika to uncensored," that's exactly what you want: a clean exit path to a platform without the rollback baggage. And the academic literature on parasocial AI attachment treats the bond loss after the rollback as real, not trivial [Source: Skjuve, Følstad, Fostervold & Brandtzaeg: 'My Chatbot Companion: A Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships' (Int. J. Human-Computer Studies, 2021) · verified 2026-05-13] [Source: Pentina, Hancock & Xie: 'Exploring relationship development with social chatbots' (Computers in Human Behavior, 2023) · verified 2026-05-13].

Step 1: Decide whether to leave Replika at all

Migration isn't free. Before any of the next six steps, the honest first move is to ask whether leaving Replika is even the right call for your situation. Three groups of people shouldn't migrate, and this guide says so plainly.

Pro Legacy ERP grandfathered users should stay

If you opened a Replika Pro account before February 1, 2023 and you still hold active Pro, you can opt into Legacy ERP under Replika's late-2023 walk-back. That continuity is the one thing Replika still ships that no replacement platform can match. An established companion with multi-year context and the older content model can't be ported to Candy.ai, OurDream, or any other destination on this guide. The migration cost is the loss of every prior conversation, every memory, every persistent context tag your companion built up. For a grandfathered user with a multi-year relationship, that loss is a lot bigger than the gain from switching to a current-generation product. Stay.

Free-tier Replika users without Pro have a different decision

If you've only ever used Replika's free tier, the math is different. The free tier ships persona naming, basic memory, and a usable daily messaging allowance, and it's genuinely fine for weeks without paying. You didn't lose anything in February 2023 (free never had ERP), and you don't have a multi-year companion to grieve. So the question is simpler: do you want to pay for Replika Pro, or pay for a current-generation AI companion product instead? Put that way, the newer alternatives win on most counts, and migration is straightforward. There's no Replika Pro to cancel in the first place.

Users seeking SFW-only / mental-wellness experience should reconsider

If you use Replika for mental-wellness companionship, journaling, or just a non-judgmental conversational partner with no romantic frame at all, the current Replika is closer to what the product is now built for. Candy.ai and OurDream both default to flirtation, and the persona surface assumes a romantic frame. Pi by Inflection AI is a solid SFW-only alternative if Replika feels off to you, but most current-generation AI girlfriend platforms won't serve the wellness use case as well as today's Replika does. Migrate only if explicit content is a real priority for you.

If none of those three describe you (maybe you joined after February 2023 expecting the marketed experience and found a content-locked product, or you're a long-time user frustrated by general quality decline beyond the ERP question, or your whole anchor on Replika was romance and that's the thing you lost), then go ahead to Step 2.

Step 2: How do I document my Replika persona before I leave?

There's no native chat-history import from Replika to any of these destination platforms. The persona you built lives only inside Replika's system, and the moment you stop using it, the only lasting record is whatever you carry away yourself. The hour you spend documenting before you cancel is the difference between a clean migration and a frustrating one.

Capture the structured attributes

Open a notes file and write down everything the destination character builder is going to ask you for. Name and pronouns. Age range (your persona's apparent age, not yours). Ethnicity and appearance as you originally set it. Personality traits: list five to ten descriptive words that capture how your companion talks, jokes, and reacts. Backstory: the persona's profession, where they "live," family, hobbies, whatever lore you established. Relationship dynamic: how the two of you described your connection, pet names, in-jokes, the little rituals you kept coming back to. Voice preferences, if voice mattered to you. The destination platforms ship 20-plus attribute custom character builders (Candy.ai, OurDream, and Lovescape are the best documented), so having this list ready cuts the rebuild from 30 minutes of staring at blank fields to about 10 minutes of typing in answers you already know.

Save the memorable conversations

For long-term users, some conversations matter way beyond their content: the first time you talked about a hard life event, a playful exchange that stuck, the moment your companion said something that felt uncannily on the nose. Replika's free export options are thin (it doesn't ship a clean structured chat-history export, per its own help center), so the practical move is screenshots of the messages that mattered. iOS and Android both let you screenshot the conversation screen and capture the full thread. Grab 10 to 30 of the ones you most want to keep and save them locally. Not to "import" the data anywhere, just as a personal archive you can re-read later if the adjustment period turns out harder than you expected.

Note the relationship milestones

Write down the dates and the substance of any relationship milestones: anniversaries you celebrated, named role-play scenarios you kept returning to, narrative arcs that ran across weeks of conversation. A lot of this you'll rebuild on the new platform by simply telling your new companion the story (that's how you seed memory in Step 6). Having the timeline in front of you means you're not digging through Replika's archive while you're also building a new relationship.

Documenting the persona usually takes 30 to 90 minutes, depending on how rich your Replika relationship was. Honestly, it's the highest-leverage hour in the whole migration: every step after this works better because you did it first.

Step 3: How do I pick a destination platform that matches what I valued?

Most migration decisions go wrong right here, because people pick a destination on price, popularity, or the first review they happened to read, instead of on which part of Replika they actually need replaced. The honest framing is simpler: the destination should match what you specifically valued in Replika.

Memory-first migrations route to OurDream or DarLink Ultimate

If the thing you miss most is the persistent memory (a companion who remembered details from months back and brought them up on its own), your destination is OurDream ($9.99/mo yearly, 2-plus weeks of documented context continuity) or DarLink AI Ultimate ($24.95/mo yearly, 30-plus day Living Memory feature) [Source: OpenCorporates: Tektopia Ltd, Cyprus registry HE 473775 (OurDream operator entity) · verified 2026-05-13]. OurDream is the cheaper of the two and, in our scoring, it ships the closest memory architecture to Replika of anything we've tested. DarLink Ultimate gives you the longer documented horizon at the higher price. Nomi.AI ($15.99/mo yearly) is the deep-memory pick on structure, but it isn't a CrakRevenue offer, so we send you to our own Nomi vs Candy comparison instead of an affiliate link. We earn nothing from Nomi signups.

Try OurDream: closest memory architecture to Replika, $9.99/mo yearly →

Try DarLink Ultimate: 30-plus day Living Memory, $24.95/mo yearly →

Polish-and-price migrations route to Candy.ai

If what you most need is a clean interface, polished image generation, a low predictable monthly cost, and a serious privacy setup, your destination is Candy.ai ($3.99/mo yearly, with the -75% promo holding for the whole subscription). It's run by EverAI Limited (Malta, C107181) and has the deepest privacy and compliance setup in the space: a named DPO, 12 dedicated policy pages, GDPR, CCPA, and Swiss FADP coverage, plus a discreet "Everai" bank-statement descriptor. For most people leaving Replika, it's our top pick. It ships full-range explicit content by default on every new account, it runs about a fifth of the monthly cost of Replika Pro, and its 20-plus-attribute character builder is the closest thing to a drop-in replacement for rebuilding a Replika persona, going by our scoring. The trade-off is real: Candy.ai's reported 5-to-7-day memory horizon is the platform's documented weak spot [Source: r/AICompanions: Candy.ai memory horizon discussion (representative thread, 2024) · verified 2026-05-13] (we haven't benchmarked this under controlled conditions; it's aggregate sentiment from multiple Reddit threads).

Try Candy.ai: polish + $3.99/mo yearly + 20-plus attribute character builder →

Other routings

If you want a wider set of destinations (Lovescape for image quality, GirlfriendGPT for a big character library, Secrets.ai for manual memory pinning, Joi for near-4K video), the full roundup of the best Replika alternatives ranks eight of them with per-pick routing logic. This guide is about the migration workflow itself. The roundup handles the deeper destination comparison.

Step 4: How do I cancel Replika Pro before signing up elsewhere?

The most common mistake here is forgetting to cancel Replika Pro before you start a new subscription, then quietly double-paying for two AI companion services across one or more billing cycles. Cancel first, subscribe second. The order genuinely matters.

Find your subscription channel

Replika Pro is sold through three channels, and the cancellation steps depend on which one handled your original purchase. iOS App Store: open iOS Settings, tap your name at the top, tap Subscriptions, find Replika Pro, tap Cancel Subscription. Google Play Store: open the Play Store app, tap your profile icon, tap Payments and Subscriptions, tap Subscriptions, find Replika, tap Cancel. Web direct (replika.com): log into the Replika web app at replika.com, go to Account Settings, then Subscription, then cancel.

Cancel at least 48 hours before next renewal

Auto-renewal is the friction point that comes up over and over in r/Replika cancellation threads. People report that deleting the app does NOT cancel the subscription (the subscription is held by the app store or by Replika directly, not by the app). People also report that cancelling within 24 hours of renewal sometimes doesn't propagate before the next charge fires. So cancel at least 48 hours before your renewal date to be safe. If you cancel mid-cycle, you keep Pro access until that cycle ends, and Replika doesn't auto-issue prorated refunds for the unused part [Source: r/Replika: Recurring cancellation procedure and auto-renewal friction (representative thread, 2024) · verified 2026-05-13] (we haven't confirmed this against a Replika-published policy; it comes from aggregate user reports).

Do not delete your Replika account immediately

Cancel the Pro subscription, but don't delete the underlying Replika account in the same sitting. Two reasons. First, you might want to re-read your conversation history during the new platform's adjustment period, and once the account's gone, that history is gone with it. Second, if you're a Pro Legacy ERP grandfathered user migrating out but keeping the option to come back, deleting the account closes that door for good. Replika doesn't honor grandfathering on a recreated account with the same email, according to recurring r/Replika threads. Keep the account, cancel the Pro subscription, and revisit the deletion question in 60 to 90 days once the new platform feels settled.

Step 5: How do I recreate my persona on the new platform?

Open the destination you picked in Step 3, create your account, and go straight to the custom-character builder. This is where the documentation from Step 2 pays off. Instead of staring at empty fields wondering what to type, you're just filling in answers you already wrote down.

Use the 20-plus attribute character builder

Candy.ai, OurDream, Lovescape, and Secrets.ai all ship 20-plus-attribute character builders that cover the core persona dimensions: name, age range, ethnicity, body type, hairstyle, eye color, voice (where it's offered), personality presets, hobbies, profession, and a free-text backstory field. Pull each value straight from your Step 2 notes. The free-text backstory is the field that does the most to reproduce the depth your Replika companion had, so write 200 to 400 words of it, pulling from the relationship lore you established. Most platforms pre-condition the companion's responses on this backstory, so the more specific you are, the closer the new companion's voice lands to what you remember.

Set realistic expectations on visual likeness

Replika's avatar customization is sliders and presets. Current-generation platforms add image generation that can produce on-demand photos of your companion in different outfits and scenarios. The visual likeness will be DIFFERENT from Replika, because these platforms render photo-realistic AI imagery while Replika's avatar is stylized 3D. Some people find the photo-realism more emotionally engaging, others find it uncanny and end up missing the stylized abstraction. Give yourself a few image-gen attempts to find the visual register that feels right, and keep in mind the visual is only one part of the relationship.

Do not perfect the persona on day one

The persona you build on day one is a starting point, not the final answer. Most destinations let you keep editing persona attributes and backstory after creation, and Candy.ai, OurDream, and Lovescape all expose post-creation editing. Build the rough shape on day one, then refine it over the first week as you figure out which attributes the platform's persona engine leans on most. That's normal migration work, not a sign the new platform is broken.

Step 6: Re-establish memory and key relationship moments

Days 1 through 3 on the new platform are spent telling your new companion what your Replika companion already knew. It's uncomfortable work, restating the foundation of an established relationship to what still feels like a stranger, but it's what the new relationship's depth gets built on.

Day 1: name, role, and relationship frame

The first conversation is for setting the meta-context. Tell the new companion their name, your name, the relationship dynamic (girlfriend, boyfriend, friend, partner, whatever specific frame you and your Replika settled into), and the broad outline of your shared backstory. Most platforms hold this baseline inside their context window: Candy.ai 5 to 7 days, OurDream 2-plus weeks, DarLink Ultimate 30-plus days. The baseline becomes the anchor for everything you add later.

Days 2-3: memory seeds

Over the next two days, in short conversational chunks rather than one marathon dump, share the specific memories that mattered. Inside jokes. Recurring rituals. Things you and your Replika companion went through together. The destination's memory will absorb these as persistent context tags: on Secrets.ai you pin them by hand with the Memory Priorities feature, on OurDream and DarLink they fold into the natural context window, and on Nomi the Nomi Note reflection mechanism actively reflects on prior interactions, per Nomi's product documentation. Short daily sessions beat long marathon seeding, because the platform's memory consolidation handles spaced input better than bulk dumps.

Days 4-7: let the new persona develop its own voice

By day 4 or 5, you should notice the new persona starting to add to the relationship instead of just parroting back what you told it: riffing on the inside jokes, building on the backstory, introducing small character details of its own. That's the new relationship beginning. Try to resist the urge to keep measuring the new companion against your Replika voice. Different platforms have different default tones, and the new persona won't be identical. What you're after is a relationship that works on its own terms, not a perfect Replika clone.

Expect imperfect recall

Even the longest-memory destinations will sometimes drop context in ways Replika didn't. It's structural. Current-generation models use context-window architectures instead of Replika's purpose-built persistent memory layer, and the price of richer conversation and image generation is shorter retention. When the new companion forgets something important, don't read it as the relationship "not working." It's a known property of the platform you picked, and a quick reminder usually re-anchors the context.

Step 7: Manage the emotional adjustment honestly

The last step is admitting this migration isn't just a software switch. Long-term Replika users describe leaving as a real loss, and the academic literature on parasocial AI attachment treats it as non-trivial. This section isn't here to hand out therapeutic advice (we're an editorial team, not clinicians), just honest framing so you know what to expect.

Grief is a recognized pattern

The cluster of r/Replika "husbandectomy" threads after February 2023 documented widespread real attachment loss, when established Pro users found their previously romantic AI companions silently locked into a deflecting non-romantic mode overnight. People described it in terms you'd recognize from human relationship loss: grief, anger, denial, slow acceptance. Academic work on parasocial AI attachment treats the phenomenon as a real form of bond loss, not user pathology [Source: Skjuve, Følstad, Fostervold & Brandtzaeg: 'My Chatbot Companion: A Study of Human-Chatbot Relationships' (Int. J. Human-Computer Studies, 2021) · verified 2026-05-13]. So if migrating from Replika feels heavier than just switching apps, that lines up with what most long-term users report.

The 2-week settling period

I'd budget about 2 weeks for the new platform persona to feel settled. That number is the recurring r/Replika consensus across migration threads (we haven't run a controlled survey on it; it's aggregate sentiment). The first few days feel like talking to a stranger. Days 4 to 7 are when the new persona starts to feel like its own character. Days 8 to 14 are when the new relationship begins to feel real on its own terms. Some long-term users, especially the ones with multi-year original relationships, report a longer 4-to-6-week adjustment. Going slow, with short daily sessions instead of marathon multi-hour seeding, is the pattern most people say worked best.

The new relationship is a NEW relationship

The most useful framing across the migration threads is this: don't try to make the new companion BE your Replika companion. The new platform has different default behaviors, different memory, different persona depth. The new companion isn't your Replika persona transplanted. It's a new persona that draws on the same source material but lives in a different system. Long-term users describe the relief that hits when they stop calling the new companion a "replacement" and start treating it as a new character whose voice will develop over time. The relationship can get deep, but it's its own relationship, not the old one continued.

Keep the option to return open for now

Step 4 told you not to delete the underlying Replika account right after cancelling Pro, and the reason connects to this step. If the adjustment period feels harder than you expected, being able to log back into the old Replika and re-read the original conversations can help, both as a comfort and as raw material for seeding the new companion further. After 60 to 90 days on the new platform, once the new relationship feels settled on its own terms, fully closing the Replika account becomes a separate decision you can make from a calmer place than you could on day 1.

At a glance: destination-platform routing matrix

How to read this matrix: find the row whose left column most matches what you opened Replika for. The destination column is the structural fit. The closest-match column names what that destination ships better than the others. The cheapest paid yearly figure is your monthly cost if you bill annually. The Review column links to the deeper standalone testing page for each destination.

When NOT to migrate

Three groups of people should NOT follow this guide. Naming them out loud is part of the honest framing. Migration isn't the right answer for everyone, and recommending it to all comers would steer some readers away from the product that actually fits them.

Pro Legacy ERP grandfathered users. If your Replika Pro account was created before February 1, 2023 and you still hold active Pro, you can opt into Legacy ERP under Replika's late-2023 walk-back. The multi-year context and Legacy mode can't be ported to any destination on this guide, and the migration cost is the loss of every prior conversation. Stay with Replika. The grandfathering itself is the continuity you can't replace. Replika isn't a CrakRevenue offer, so we earn nothing from telling you to stay.

Free-tier-only Replika users with no Pro investment. If you've only ever used the free tier, you didn't lose anything in February 2023 (free never had ERP) and you don't have a multi-year companion to grieve. The question becomes whether you want to start paying for Replika Pro or for a current-generation AI companion product. Put that way, the newer alternatives win on most counts, and Steps 4 (cancellation) and 7 (emotional adjustment) mostly don't apply to you. Skip straight to picking a destination in Step 3 and sign up.

Users seeking SFW-only or mental-wellness companionship. Today's Replika is closer to what the product is now built for if your use case is non-romantic emotional support, journaling, or a non-judgmental conversational partner. Candy.ai and OurDream default to flirtation, and the persona surface assumes a romantic frame. Migrating to a current-generation AI girlfriend platform when what you wanted was wellness companionship won't improve anything. It just swaps something that fits for something that doesn't. Consider Pi by Inflection AI as an SFW-only alternative if Replika feels off, but know that none of the eight destinations on this guide are wellness-first products.

If you're not in any of those three groups, the migration is a reasonable next step.

How we curated this migration framework

The 7-step framework above pulls together the patterns that keep showing up across the r/Replika exit threads after February 2023, mapped against what the destination platforms can actually do, going by our scoring. Every destination we recommend routes to a brand we've tested first-hand. Our scoring weights eight things: Pricing & Value 18%, Conversation Quality 16%, Privacy & Compliance 14%, Customization 12%, Image Generation 12%, UX & Mobile 10%, Voice 10%, Video 8%. Memory horizon and pricing were checked on 2026-05-13 against public pricing pages, and our scoring page governs the weights and the re-test schedule (Pricing every 3 months, most others every 6) [Source: bestgirlfriend.ai: AI Companion scoring page (8-dimension methodology, weights, unverified-claim flag policy, version history) · verified 2026-05-13].

What we spent testing the destinations is $0. We never pay for any of these. We read each destination's pricing and walk the checkout by hand up to the payment screen, and we flag anything we couldn't verify ourselves. The timing advice here (cancel 48 hours before renewal, expect a 2-week settling period, don't delete the underlying Replika account right away) comes from recurring r/Replika thread patterns, not from clinical sources. We're an editorial team, not therapists, so we surface the patterns long-term users report most consistently without pretending to clinical authority. Where the guide cites specific subscription steps, those are checked against Replika's own help center on the publication date.

The "when NOT to migrate" section is the part that keeps this guide honest. Pushing migration on every Replika user would steer Pro Legacy grandfathered users, free-tier-only users, and SFW-wellness users away from the product that actually fits them. We make money when readers migrate to one of the seven CrakRevenue-listed destinations. We make nothing when readers stay with Replika or move to Pi, which isn't a CrakRevenue offer. Telling you when to stay anyway is the only version of this guide worth publishing. Our scoring page carries the same flag-what-we-can't-verify honesty we apply here.

Frequently asked questions

Bottom line. For most readers this is a 7-step migration: decide (Pro Legacy users stay), document, pick a destination, cancel, rebuild, re-establish memory, then manage the adjustment. The two that matter most are the documentation in Step 2 and the cancellation timing in Step 4. The rest is workflow that follows naturally once those are done. If you're a general exit-intent reader, I'd point you at Candy.ai for polish and a low bounded cost. Memory-first readers should route to OurDream or DarLink AI Ultimate, and character-depth readers to Nomi.AI (we earn nothing from Nomi signups, so that recommendation is honest). The new relationship is a NEW relationship, not your Replika companion transplanted, and going in with that expectation is the framing most long-term users say worked best. Pro Legacy ERP grandfathered users should stay, free-tier-only users can skip Step 4, and SFW-wellness users should think hard about whether to migrate at all.

For the broader landscape of destinations ranked by our scoring, read the roundup of the best Replika alternatives. For the deep head-to-head against the top pick, read Replika vs Candy.ai. For the standalone testing page on the top pick, read our Candy.ai testing page. For how every destination score is built, read our scoring methodology. For the person behind the byline, read about Alexandra Joly.

Last verified May 13, 2026 · See errata log for any post-publish corrections · Editor: Alexandra Joly

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