Why does jurisdiction matter for a chat app?
Because of what is in the conversation, which is unlike almost any other category of software.
People tell an AI companion things they do not tell anyone else — loneliness, relationship difficulties, sexuality, anxieties, things they are working through. That transcript is a psychological record, and it is created continuously without anyone deciding to create it.
With a US-established operator, that record sits within reach of the CLOUD Act regardless of where the servers are. With Selira in the Netherlands, Simone in France, Xeve.ai in Germany or MyLovely AI in Spain, it is processed by an EU-established company under GDPR — which means defined purposes, a right of access and a right of erasure that actually attaches to someone.
That is the substantive difference between these and Character.AI or Replika, and it is a bigger one than any feature.
What should you actually check before signing up?
Four things, and none of them appear on the landing page.
Data retention: how long conversations are kept, and whether deleting your account deletes them. Under GDPR you have a right to erasure, but exercising it is easier when the operator has already built for it.
Whether conversations train models: some operators use conversation data to improve their systems, which is a different question from whether they keep it. It should be answered in the privacy policy rather than inferred.
Payment discretion: what appears on a card statement, since these are personal purchases. And subscription mechanics: how the free tier converts, what the premium tier actually unlocks, and how cancellation works — the same questions worth asking of any recurring consumer subscription.
What separates these apps from each other?
Less than the marketing suggests, which is why trying two is more useful than comparing them on paper.
The common set is companion chat with customisable characters or personas, image generation, and free tiers with premium plans. Selira adds voice messages, Xeve.ai leans towards roleplay with customisable characters, MyLovely AI and Darlink both emphasise persona customisation, and Simone positions towards natural conversation rather than character play.
What actually differs is conversational quality — whether the character stays consistent across a long conversation, remembers earlier context and responds in a way that does not collapse into repetition. No specification sheet captures that, and it varies between apps more than any listed feature.
Since all of them have free tiers, the honest method is to spend twenty minutes in two of them. The one that still feels coherent at the end is the answer.
Where is each of these based?
Spread across Europe, and the distinction between EU and adequacy is worth carrying.
Inside the EU: Selira in the Netherlands, Simone from Agentik SAS in France, Xeve.ai from Jay Web Development in Olching, Bavaria, MyLovely AI from PromptRepublic S.L. in Madrid, Dream Companion in Germany and Soulkyn AI from Dublin. All of them are intra-EEA processing under GDPR directly.
Outside the EU but adequate: Darlink operates from Switzerland, so Swiss data protection law applies under an EU adequacy decision. Transfers from the EU are lawful without standard contractual clauses, and it is a strong privacy regime — it simply is not EU processing, which matters to a small number of people and not to most.
The two remaining entries are in this category by classification error rather than by nature, which the next question covers.
What do these apps not do?
Three things worth knowing before you expect them, because the marketing in this category is uniformly optimistic.
They are not therapy. A companion app will listen indefinitely and agree readily, which is exactly what makes it comforting and exactly why it is not a substitute for a person trained to disagree with you. Several of these products carry no clinical safeguards at all.
They are not memory-perfect. Every app here will lose track of something established earlier in a long conversation, and how gracefully it recovers is the single biggest quality difference between them — and the thing no feature list shows.
They are not private from the operator. GDPR governs what an EU-established company may do with the transcript and gives you a right to have it deleted; it does not mean nobody can read it. If that distinction matters to you, it is the retention and deletion policy you should be reading, not the privacy badge.
