We checked 43 AI companion apps every 15 minutes for a month. One was dead, 34 never blinked

Original data: AI Companion Radar has fetched the homepage of every app in its directory every 15 minutes since 2 October 2026 from a server in Frankfurt. This article covers the first full month, 3 October to 2 November, 2,976 checks per app and 127,968 in total. The live board is at /status. Radar takes no money from any app and uses no affiliate links.

Thirty-four of the 43 apps answered every single check. Eight had short incidents that added up to 480 minutes between them. One, Digi AI, did not answer once in 31 days, because its domain no longer resolves. If you strip that one out, the group ran at 99.97% availability for the month, which is better than most of the subscription services people compare them to.

The response-time side is less flattering. Median homepage times ranged from 51 milliseconds to just over a second, and five apps hid behind a bot wall for the whole month, so for those we can only say that a server answered.

Minutes offline per app, 3 October to 2 November 2026. Only 8 of 43 apps had any.

Who went down, and for how long

SillyTavern had the most incidents, eight, totalling 210 minutes, with the longest single outage of the month, an hour on 21 October when its site returned Cloudflare 522 errors and then timed out. That sounds bad until you remember what the site is: SillyTavern is software you run on your own machine, and the website is its documentation. Nobody's chat stopped.

Soulfun was offline for 75 minutes across four incidents, all timeouts, most of them on 15 October. Pephop AI lost an hour across four incidents of the same kind. Dondi AI had three separate 15-minute blips with three different errors, a 503, a Cloudflare 522 and a timeout, which fits its other result below: it was also the slowest site in the group.

DreamGF had one incident of 45 minutes on 4 October, three consecutive HTTP 500 responses, the only sustained server error from an app that otherwise ran clean. Kupid AI, Seduced AI and Replika each missed exactly one check in the month, a single 15-minute window that may have been shorter in reality.

Everything else, from Character.AI in the middle of its bankruptcy to one-person web apps, answered 2,976 times out of 2,976.

The one that never came back

Digi AI failed every check with a DNS error. Its domain does not point anywhere, so there is no server to be slow or fast. The app had been fading since the summer, and the monitor confirms what users on its subreddit had worked out: it is gone. We keep the profile up because people still search for it and deserve a straight answer, and because it is the clearest illustration of where the real risk in this category sits.

Servers in this market are reliable. Companies are not. In the same month that 34 apps posted perfect uptime, Character.AI was in Chapter 11 with a buyer for its technology but not its service, and Digi AI simply stopped existing. The thing that ends your subscription is far more likely to be a shutdown than an outage, which is why the length of the plan you buy matters more than any uptime figure. Our comparison of refund policies shows how few apps give anything back for unused months, and the Character.AI alternatives piece covers what to do when a platform you rely on is sold or closed.

How fast the homepages are

Median homepage response time from Frankfurt, all 43 apps.

Nomi AI was the fastest site in the directory at a median of 51 milliseconds, with CharStar, HeraHaven and MyBabes also under 110. At the other end, Dondi AI took a median of 1,015 milliseconds to serve its homepage, Soulfun 913 and PolyBuzz 766. Xotic AI, Eva AI, Nectar AI and Anima all sat around half a second.

The 95th percentile is the number that describes a bad day. Soulfun, Nectar AI, Anima and Xotic AI all had a 95th percentile above 1.4 seconds, meaning one check in twenty took longer than that just to receive the page. These are homepage figures measured from one European city, so a user in Texas or Manila will see different numbers, but the ranking between apps should hold.

What a bot wall hides

Five apps answered every one of our checks with HTTP 403: Character.AI, CrushOn AI, Janitor AI, Linky AI and Muah AI. Talkie did so on 58% of checks. A 403 means a protection layer, usually Cloudflare, decided our monitor was a bot and served it a challenge page instead of the site.

We count that as up, because the server is clearly there, but it is a weaker signal. The fast response times those five show in the chart are the speed of the wall, not of the app. And a bot wall can stay up while the application behind it is broken. For those apps the only honest statement is that nothing was visibly down.

What this does and does not measure

A homepage check is the simplest possible probe. It says whether the public site answers. It does not say whether the chat model is responding, whether image generation is backed up, or whether logged-in users are seeing errors, and those are the failures people actually complain about. An app can post 100% here and still have a miserable week on the inside.

The 15-minute interval also means an outage shorter than that can slip between two checks, and every incident we did catch is rounded up to 15-minute blocks. The real total for the eight apps with incidents is somewhere between 480 minutes and considerably less. We also check from a single location, so a regional network problem near Frankfurt would show up as the app's fault.

Uptime does not feed into Radar scores. Our scoring method covers conversation, memory, media, pricing honesty and policy clarity, and none of this month's results would have moved any of them. If an app starts failing for days rather than minutes, that changes, and the profile will say so.

Every app, every number

Sorted by uptime, then by median response time. Apps without a link are ones Radar no longer profiles but kept monitoring.

Method: HTTP GET of each app's homepage every 15 minutes with a desktop browser user agent, 25-second timeout, from a DigitalOcean server in Frankfurt. Up means any HTTP status below 500, including 401, 403, 405 and 429. Down means a 5xx status, a timeout or a DNS or connection error. Response time is the full time to fetch the page. Checks run concurrently, so a slow check for one app does not delay another. No check runs were excluded; there was no 15-minute window in which eight or more apps failed together, which is the pattern a problem on our side would produce.