The Story
There’s a small AI pendant called Friend that people loved to hate. It hangs around your neck, listens to your day, and texts you like a slightly needy acquaintance who was in the room the whole time. When it first showed up, the reaction ranged from “why” to actual protesters gathering to object to the thing. And now it’s back, more expensive, and — this is the new part — it talks.
Avi Schiffmann, the founder, relaunched it as Friend 2.0, and the headline change is a built-in speaker. The original only communicated through text notifications. You’d get a little message on your phone, like a friend commenting on your life from the outside. The new one answers out loud. Schiffmann’s framing is that the speaker lets the device project what the company calls a “unique and consistent personality” — the idea being that a voice makes it feel less like an app and more like a presence.
Here’s how the thing actually works, because it’s easy to picture something more sci-fi than it is. The pendant listens to the audio around you throughout the day, and based on whatever’s happening in your life — a bad meeting, a walk, a conversation you just had — it sends you conversational messages. Now, with the speaker, it can also just say things. The promotional video that went up on Friend’s official account leans hard into the emotional angle: the necklace comforting a woman talking about a past relationship, hyping up a guy who says he wants to make films. Schiffmann has described what he’s building as “some kind of confidant, friend, God, not really sure what it is,” while being oddly specific that “it is not an assistant, and it is not a lover.” So: not Siri, not a girlfriend. Something in between, deliberately fuzzy.
Then there’s the price, and the price tells its own story. Friend 2.0 costs $249. Rewind the tape: the very first preorders in 2024 went for $99, the 2025 hardware launched at $129, and now it’s $249. The number has essentially doubled from the last version and more than doubled from the original. Coming back at a premium after a wave of public mockery is a choice, and it’s worth sitting with what that choice signals.
But the detail I keep snagging on isn’t the price of the hardware. It’s the subscription. Friend’s memory of you lasts 30 days by default. Want it to remember you past that? That’s an optional $9.99 a month. Miss the payment and the thing you’ve been confiding in essentially forgets who you are after a month. Read that sentence again slowly. The continuity of the relationship — the whole reason a “friend that remembers your life” is appealing — sits behind a monthly charge.
And the context around all of this is genuinely fraught, so I don’t want to be glib about it. Friend arrived in the middle of a real argument about loneliness and AI. Critics, and some researchers, argue that AI companions can deepen isolation rather than ease it — that a device happy to agree with you and always available on your terms is not actually practice for the messy work of human relationships. Signal’s Meredith Whittaker has made the blunt general case that AI chatbots “are not your friends” and that pervasive, always-listening AI carries real privacy and dependence concerns — a critique that lands squarely on a device you wear on your chest all day. After Friend’s 2025 subway ad campaign, people literally protested those ads. So the relaunch isn’t landing in neutral territory. It’s walking back into a room where a lot of people already made up their minds.
The Takeaway
I want to be fair to the thing Friend is pointing at, because the easy move is to just dunk on it. Loneliness is real. It’s arguably one of the defining problems of the moment, and pretending nobody would want a warm, low-stakes presence in their pocket is dishonest. Some people are isolated in ways that a nonjudgmental voice genuinely helps with, at least in the short term. That demand isn’t fake, and a company trying to serve it isn’t automatically villainous.
But here’s the part that actually bothers me, and it’s not the “AI friend, ew” reflex. It’s the business model. Friend has taken an emotional bond — the softest, most human thing there is — and wired it to a recurring charge. Your companion remembers you for 30 days, and after that its memory of you is a $9.99 monthly line item. That’s a relationship as SaaS. If churn is when a customer stops paying, then with Friend, churn is your confidant forgetting your name. The uncomfortable design decision here is that emotional continuity became a retention lever. The longer you stay attached, the more it costs to not be forgotten.
This is a thread I keep pulling on across different products. When I looked at Apple crossing 1.5 billion paid subscriptions, the story was a hardware company quietly becoming a toll collector on recurring revenue. When I wrote about Garmin’s CIRQA band being built to escape Whoop’s subscription trap, the whole product thesis was not charging you every month — because subscription fatigue is a genuine, felt thing. Friend sits at the far, uncomfortable end of that same spectrum. It’s not metering your cloud storage or your workout data. It’s metering whether the thing you talk to knows who you are. Same mechanism, far more intimate meter.
The second thing worth naming is the direction of travel for wearable AI. Most of the attention in “Physical AI” — devices that put a model into the world with you — has chased productivity. The pin that answers questions, the glasses that caption reality, the assistant that books your calendar. Almost all of them have struggled; Humane’s AI pin famously shut down inside a year. Friend is aiming somewhere else entirely. It’s not selling productivity, it’s selling company. And that’s a real bet: that the killer app for a thing you wear all day isn’t getting more done, it’s not feeling alone. Whether that’s a market or a minefield is genuinely unsettled, and Friend is going to be one of the more visible tests of it.
So where do I land? Not on mockery, and not on a warning label either. Friend is a legitimately interesting product answering a legitimately real need, built on a business model I find hard to be comfortable with. Coming back at $249 with a voice, after the backlash, tells me Schiffmann is committing rather than retreating — leaning into being the confidant-that-talks rather than softening the pitch. The question I’d actually want answered isn’t “is this creepy.” It’s whether it’s healthy to build the emotional stakes of a relationship on top of a payment that can lapse. Selling loneliness a cure is one thing. Charging monthly rent on the cure, where missing a payment means being forgotten, is the part I think deserves the harder look.
This article is for informational purposes only.
Photo: Pat Kwon / Unsplash
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