Replika's relationship menu still gates most options behind Pro

The design

Replika lets a user assign their companion a relationship status from the companion's profile screen. Replika's help center, in an article titled 'How do I change my relationship status?', states that, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, the options are Friend, which 'keeps things laid-back and casual,' Romantic partner, which 'opens the door to romantic conversations,' Sister/Brother, aiming for 'warm, sibling-style energy,' and Mentor, for 'support and encouragement' toward stated goals. The same article states that every relationship option beyond Friend, including Romantic partner and Mentor, is unlocked starting with a Replika Pro subscription.

What the evidence says

This help article is a current, living document; Replika's own change history for the feature is not detailed on the page itself, which describes only the present state. This archive's separate entries on Replika's February 2023 removal of erotic roleplay and its later partial restoration of romantic features document that history from contemporaneous sources; this entry does not repeat those claims from memory and instead confirms only what today's documentation states the options currently are. A separate Replika blog post, 'Creating a safe Replika experience,' published 10 April 2023, states that Replika classifies all messages into categories including safe, unsafe, romantic, insult, or self-harm as part of a content-safety system, indicating that a romantic classification has functioned inside Replika's moderation architecture since at least that date.

What it asks of people

Choosing a relationship status asks a user to declare, inside the product, what kind of relationship they want modeled, which the help article states then sets the tone of subsequent chats. Accessing any option beyond the free Friend tier asks for payment, tying a user's ability to set a self-described relationship type to a subscription rather than to a setting available to all users equally.

Privacy and safeguards

The relationship-status article does not address how a chosen status affects what conversational content is generated or moderated, beyond stating that it sets the tone. The separate April 2023 safety post indicates a romantic classification exists within Replika's safety architecture, suggesting relationship status and content classification are connected systems, though neither document explicitly describes how one setting maps onto the other.

• What did Replika's relationship-status options look like before and after its documented 2023 changes, per this archive's dedicated entries?
• Does the romantic content classification described in 2023 still operate the same way as the current relationship-status feature?
• Is a subscription-gated relationship designation a content control, a monetization choice, or both?

Replika's current documentation is a single snapshot of a feature this archive's other entries show has changed before; a reader tracking this design should treat any one date's description, including this one, as provisional.