What Is Chat AI? The App, Its Pricing, Pros and Cons

Chat AI is a mobile chatbot app from the developer Codeway that lets you talk to several big AI models, such as GPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, inside one app. It is free to download on the App Store and Google Play, and most of its power sits behind a paid subscription that can be bought by the week, the year or once for life. The app is listed as “Chat AI: Ask Agent Anything” and was long known as Chat & Ask AI.

The name causes real confusion, because dozens of small apps use almost the same words. This explainer pins down which Chat AI most people mean, what it can do, what the plans cost, what its privacy labels say, and when you would be better off paying ChatGPT, Google, Anthropic or Microsoft directly.

Which Chat AI App Are People Searching For?

Type “Chat AI” into the App Store and you will see a wall of lookalike icons. Most are small apps from independent developers, but one stands far above the rest in size and popularity, and that is the application this article covers.

On the App Store, the app appears as Chat AI: Ask Agent Anything, with the subtitle “Chatbot & Smart Assistant.” The seller is Deep Flow Software Services FZCO, and the copyright line names Codeway. The listing showed a 4.9-star rating from about 5,000 reviews and a place in the top 100 free productivity apps. The Android version uses the same name and the package ID com.codeway.chatapp. The app had more than 50 million users in February 2026, when it was still widely called Chat & Ask AI.

Some of the smaller apps with nearly the same name are listed below. They are separate products from separate developers, so their prices, models and privacy rules do not carry over to Codeway’s app, which is why it pays to check the developer name on the store page before you buy anything.

The second app has eight in-app purchases and a 4.7-star rating from about 15,000 reviews. The third app is rated 18+, and its developer states that it collects no data. Its own description also mixes up its plan lengths, which is not an encouraging sign, and none of the smaller apps names the AI models it uses, while Codeway’s app lists them openly.

What Chat AI Does and Which AI Models It Runs On

Chat AI does not build its own language model, because it is what the technology industry calls a wrapper: an application that sits on top of models from other companies and forwards your questions to them. The app connects to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, and lets users pick which one answers.

The current App Store description goes further. It names GPT-6, Claude Opus 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Perplexity. Recent in-app event banners also promote Gemini 4 Argon, Claude Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol. These are the developer’s own claims, and the listing does not say which models are available for free and which require a subscription.

The Main Features

Beyond plain chat, the app offers a set of tools that most people will recognize from ChatGPT or Gemini, with the difference that they all live in one app with a model picker on top.

• Model choice: You can pick a different model for each task, and the app keeps a memory of the conversation as you switch.
• Ready-made assistants: There are preset helpers for copywriting, logo ideas, business plans and fitness coaching.
• Image tools: It can create images from a text prompt and explain what is in a photo, such as a building or a plant.
• Writing help: It drafts résumés, cover letters, blog posts and professional emails from a short description.
• Web search: It can look up current information instead of relying only on what a model learned in training.
• Summaries: You can upload a document or paste a link to an article or video, then ask questions about it.
• Study help: It offers language practice, homework explanations and exam revision support for students.

The app runs on iPhone with iOS 15.5 or later, on Macs with Apple silicon and on Apple Vision Pro. The App Store rates it 13+ because chats can include mature themes, crude humor or medical information. If you plan to create images with it for work, our list of sites that detect AI-generated images shows how easily clients and platforms can spot them.

Chat AI Pricing: Weekly, Yearly and Lifetime Plans

Chat AI is free to install, and the paid tier is called Premium. The app sells ten in-app purchases on iPhone, and seven of them are one-week Premium plans at slightly different prices, which usually means the developer tests different paywalls on different users. These are the US-dollar App Store prices.

Those yearly totals are simple multiplication (the weekly charge times 52), and they show exactly why the weekly plan is the one to avoid. At $7.99 a week you would spend about $34.62 a month, which is more than ChatGPT Plus or Google AI Pro. The yearly plan works out to about 58 cents a week, so paying up front cuts the cost to roughly a fourteenth of the weekly rate.

The “Elite 1 Week Free” item suggests a free first week that automatically turns into a paid weekly plan, and Apple advises cancelling a trial at least 24 hours before it ends if you do not want to be charged. Prices also change by country; the Croatian App Store, for example, lists weekly plans at €7.99 to €12.99 and lifetime access at €44.99.

Weekly billing is a common choice for consumer AI apps because it turns a small charge into a large yearly sum that few buyers add up. Our guide to SaaS pricing models explains how billing length shapes what customers end up paying.

Where Chat AI Earns Its Place

The main argument for Chat AI is convenience, since you get several leading models in one chat window and can ask the same question to a GPT model and a Claude model without paying two companies. For people who like to compare answers, that is a real time saver.

The yearly and lifetime plans are also inexpensive next to the official subscriptions, because a $29.99 year costs less than two months of ChatGPT Plus. The app also bundles image generation, photo questions, document summaries and web search, so a casual user does not need to learn four separate products.

Users seem to agree. The app has a 4.9-star average from about 5,000 App Store ratings, which is high for an app with a paywall this visible.

The Downsides: Weekly Billing, Privacy and the 2026 Leak

The weaknesses are just as visible, and two of them matter considerably more than the rest.

The Paywall Is Built Around the Weekly Plan

Seven weekly price points and a trial that rolls into weekly billing tell you which plan the app really wants you to buy, and someone who taps “continue” on a trial screen and forgets about it can pay close to $400 in a year. The listing also does not spell out what the free tier includes, so it is hard to judge what Premium adds before you pay.

Your Chats Pass Through More Than One Company

When you use ChatGPT directly, your message goes to OpenAI. When you use a wrapper, it travels to the app maker first and then on to the model provider, which means two sets of servers, two privacy policies and two separate chances for a mistake.

That risk became real in early 2026. An independent researcher found that Chat & Ask AI had left its Firebase database open, so anyone with the project address could read, change or delete data without logging in. The researcher said he could reach about 300 million messages tied to more than 25 million users, including full chat histories and the models people used. Codeway fixed the problem across all of its apps within hours of being told.

What the App Store Privacy Label Says

The developer’s privacy label on the App Store lists identifiers under “Data Used to Track You,” which means they can be used to follow you across other companies’ apps and websites. It also lists your email address and your user content (messages, photos, videos and audio) as data collected for app features, marked as not linked to your identity. Usage data, advertising data, crash logs and a device ID are collected for analytics. Apple does not check these labels itself.

The practical advice is the same for any AI application: keep passwords, health records, client files and anything you would not want made public out of your chats. If your team uses tools like this for work, set rules first; our AI acceptable use policy guide and small business cybersecurity checklist are good places to start.

Chat AI vs Going Direct to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot

Every model maker behind Chat AI also offers its own app with a free tier, so before paying a middleman it helps to know what you can get for nothing. The prices below are each company’s official US prices.

ChatGPT’s free plan gives limited access to GPT-5.5 Instant with search, voice, canvas and projects. ChatGPT Go costs $8 a month in the US with ten times the messages, uploads and images of the free tier, and Plus costs $20 a month.

Google’s AI Plus costs $4.99 a month with twice the free usage, and AI Pro at $19.99 with four times the free usage plus 5 TB of storage.

Anthropic’s Claude Pro costs $17 a month on a $200 annual bill or $20 month to month. The free Microsoft Copilot is limited by capacity, with Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year.

Put the numbers side by side and the case for Chat AI narrows. On the weekly plan it costs more per year than any of the official plans in the table. On the yearly plan it is the cheapest paid option here by a wide margin. The free tiers from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic already cover everyday writing, search and image questions, and they come straight from the company that runs the model.

Who Chat AI Suits and Who Should Skip It

Chat AI makes sense for a specific kind of user: someone who tries different models often, mostly on a phone, and is willing to pay once for a year or for life. For them, $29.99 or $39.99 buys a broad sampler of AI models for less than one month of most official plans.

It makes less sense if you only ever use one model, because that company’s free app will usually do the same job. It is also a poor fit for sensitive work. A business that handles client data should use an official plan with clear data controls, and teams that mostly need meeting summaries may be better served by one of the AI tools built for meeting notes.

Parents should note the 13+ age rating, because Chat AI is a general assistant, not a roleplay platform, but it still allows mature themes. If what your teenager really wants is character chat, our explainer on Janitor AI and its 18+ rules covers that very different kind of app.

How to Cancel a Chat AI Subscription on iPhone and Android

Chat AI bills through Apple or Google, so you cancel through them, not inside the app. Uninstalling an app does not cancel its subscription, and on an iPhone the plan is managed in your Apple Account settings rather than in the app.

On an iPhone or iPad

Cancelling on an iPhone takes four steps. First, open Settings and tap your name, then tap Subscriptions. Choose Chat AI and tap Cancel Subscription, which may be near the bottom of the page; if there is no cancel button, or you see an expiry date in red, the plan is already cancelled.

If Chat AI does not appear in the list, search your email for “receipt from Apple” to see which Apple Account was charged. A family member may have bought it, and only that person can cancel it.

On an Android Phone

On Android, the steps are similar. Sign in to the Google Account that holds the plan, open Subscriptions in Google Play, then select Chat AI, tap Cancel subscription and follow the prompts. You keep Premium until the end of the period you have already paid for, and you will not be charged again after that.

Is Chat AI ChatGPT, Who Owns It and Charges After Deleting

Is Chat AI the Same as ChatGPT?

No. ChatGPT is made by OpenAI, while Chat AI is a separate app from Codeway that sends your messages to OpenAI’s models and to models from Google, Anthropic, xAI and others.

Is the Chat AI App Free?

The download is free. Premium costs $7.39 to $7.99 a week, $29.99 a year or $39.99 for lifetime access in the US-dollar App Store, and prices vary by country.

Who Owns the Chat AI App?

The app is published by Deep Flow Software Services FZCO, and the App Store copyright line names Codeway, the company behind it. Other apps with similar names come from unrelated developers.

Is Chat AI Safe to Use?

It is a mainstream app, but it had a serious data exposure in early 2026 that Codeway fixed within hours, and its privacy label also lists identifiers used for tracking. Keep private or business data out of your chats.

Why Was I Charged After Deleting Chat AI?

Removing an app does not end its subscription, as Google’s Play help page points out. Cancel in Settings on an iPhone or in Google Play on Android, and the charges stop after the current period.

App Store Listings, the Malwarebytes Leak Report and OpenAI Plans

• Apple App Store: Chat AI: Ask Agent Anything (US-dollar storefront)
• Apple App Store: Chat AI, Croatian-language listing with euro prices
• Malwarebytes: AI Chat App Leak Exposes 300 Million Messages (February 2026)
• App Pricing Lab: Chat AI: Ask Chatbot Assistant
• Apple App Store: Deep ChatAI: AI Assistant
• OpenAI: ChatGPT Plans and Pricing
• OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT Go (January 2026)
• OpenAI Help Center: What Is ChatGPT Plus?
• Google: Google AI Plans and Gemini Subscriptions
• Anthropic: Claude Pricing
• Microsoft: Copilot Pricing Plans for Individuals
• Apple Support: Cancel a Subscription From Apple
• Google Play Help: Cancel, Pause or Change a Subscription