The Daily Allowance and Why It Exists

Every AICHIKI user has unlimited messages and unlimited regenerations. That has been true since the app launched and it is not changing. This post explains the system that sits next to that promise, the daily allowance, and the reason it exists.

What the allowance is

Every plan comes with a daily quality allowance. It is a budget of use on the stronger AI models, sized to your subscription.

• Premium starts the day on the Premium tier, our strongest models and the best roleplay experience AICHIKI offers.
• Plus starts the day on the Plus tier, a step up from Free with the memory system added.
• Free starts the day on the Free tier.

You spend the allowance as you chat. Long, elaborate conversations use it faster than short ones.

When you reach the day's ceiling, your chats step down one tier. Premium becomes Plus, Plus becomes Free, Free becomes Light. Your messages keep flowing. There is no wall, no waiting period, no shorter replies and no feature that switches off. The rest of the day simply runs on lighter models.

At midnight in your local time the allowance resets and you start the next day back at the top of your plan.

Where to see it

Open any chat, tap the menu in the top right corner and select Quality. Your current tier is shown in brackets next to it. The dashboard shows which tier you are chatting on, how close you are to the ceiling, when it resets, and which tiers your plan unlocks at full quality.

We built the dashboard so you can see what is happening instead of wondering why a reply felt different.

Why it exists

The AI models that write the replies cost money every time they are used. The strongest ones cost many times more per message than the lighter ones. A roleplay message is long, and a roleplay chat sends the whole story context with every message, so the cost adds up fast.

AICHIKI is run by the two of us. There are no investors behind it. The subscriptions and our own money pay for the models, the servers and everything else.

Free users do not run on the paid models at all. We bought a dedicated machine to serve the Free tier and we are paying it off over three years. It runs around the clock on our electricity so that free chats never draw on the models we pay per use.

Plus adds the memory system on top of Free, and its chats run on the Free model combined with some smaller paid models. They are a step up from Free and a step below Premium.

Premium runs on the strongest models we have, and that is where the best roleplay experience is. These models are also the most expensive to run, which is why the allowance matters most on Premium. Without a daily ceiling, a single very heavy day from a few users could cost more than their whole month's subscription.

We looked at the usual ways apps solve this and said no to each of them:

• Message caps. We want unlimited messaging to stay unlimited.
• Ads. Even a small ad banner means loading an advertiser's code into the app, and we are not willing to do that with your chats on screen.
• Paywalls inside a chat. Every core feature stays available on every tier.
• A higher flat price for unlimited top-tier use. Most users would pay for capacity they never touch.

The allowance was the option that kept the price flat, the messages unlimited and the app ad-free. The trade-off is that on a heavy day you finish on a lighter model than you started with. We think that is the smallest ask of the four.

Will you notice the step down?

Sometimes yes, sometimes barely. The lighter models in our pool are good and handle most conversations well. Where you will notice a difference is in deep, layered scenes, long-running stories and characters with a lot of history. That is where the Premium models stand out, and it is the main reason to be on Premium. If a reply feels off late in the day, you have three options. You can wait for the midnight reset, you can carry on and pick the scene back up at full quality tomorrow, or you can reset your allowance early with CHI, the in-app currency. The CHI reset puts you back at the top of your plan for the rest of the day, and it can be used once per day.

This is not new

The daily allowance has been part of AICHIKI from day one. What changed over time is visibility. The Chat Quality dashboard was added so you can see the system working instead of only experiencing it.

The allowance and account standing

These two get confused often, so once more: the allowance is about capacity and resets every day. Account Standing is about safety and only moves when a rule is broken. Using up your allowance has no effect on your standing, and your standing has no effect on your allowance.

If you have questions about the allowance or your dashboard, ask us on Discord or open a ticket in the app through Support.

— The AICHIKI Team (Edith & Rudi)