Candy AI beyond the Shorts: what else you pay for

Candy Shorts is the front door. Premium is the rest of the house, and every room has a token meter beside the light switch. This page lists what sits behind that door, what it costs in tokens, and which room I would visit first if you are paying mainly for the series.

What Premium adds to the Shorts

Candy’s plan page lists the benefits in one short block: unlimited text messages, the ability to create your own AI girlfriends, 18+ image generation, 18+ video generation, a “Full Live Action Experience” and 100 tokens a month. Most of that is self-explanatory. The Live Action label I can only quote, because Candy does not explain it on the pages a logged-out visitor can read.

A free account gets 5 chat messages in total, one custom character and one image, plus the free Shorts episodes. Everything else is Premium, and our free-tier guide shows where that line sits.

One pool of tokens for everything

Here is the part that matters for your wallet. Candy’s help center lists what tokens pay for: images, creating a custom AI, voice messages, voice calls (beta), My Private Content packs, and video generation, which starts from an image you generate in chat. Shorts episodes come out of the same pool, at 12 tokens each, or 30 on Creator series.

The Shorts price is the only one Candy shows a logged-out visitor. For the other features I found no public per-use price, and forum figures contradict each other, so none appear here. Top-ups exist, but pack prices are behind a login too. The practical consequence is simple: a token spent on a video is a token not spent on the next episode. The tokens guide has the budgeting method.

Which feature to try first

If you came for stories, stay with the Shorts and use our Shorts verdict to price a series before you unlock it. If the end-of-series hand-off made you curious about a character, the chat page is the next stop, and chat is the one feature a flat plan covers without spending tokens. If you want a character of your own, start with creating an AI girlfriend. Pictures and clips draw on the same pool as the episodes, so the video generator and the image generator are worth reading before you press the button.

The cards above link to each feature, and the table shows the free account against Premium side by side. See the Premium plans only after one of them has earned it.