What a Monkey App video call costs
The honest version, including the part where we cannot give you a single number.
Every service that charges for conversation is vague about it, and the vagueness is usually deliberate. So here is the whole mechanism, in the order you meet it.
Coins, bought before you need them
You do not pay per call with a card. You buy coins in advance, from inside your own account, and calls spend them as they run. Two consequences worth knowing: your card details never come up during a conversation, and when the balance runs out the call ends rather than quietly continuing on credit.
The practical advice that follows from that is unglamorous — top up before you start, not halfway through. The worst moment for a conversation to stop is the moment it gets good.
Why there is no per-minute rate
Each person sets her own price. That is not a dodge, it is the actual design: a rate that applies to everybody would mean somebody else deciding what her time is worth. The price is shown before the call connects, so you always know it in advance — but it is her number, not a house number, and it can differ from one person to the next.
This is also why you will not find "$X per minute" anywhere on this site. Any site that quotes you one flat figure for talking to any person at all is either averaging, or it has decided for everyone.
The trial allowance, and why it has no number
A new account gets a trial allowance. We deliberately do not tell you how much, and the reason is duller than it looks: how much is decided automatically, account by account, partly to stop people farming free trials with throwaway registrations. Publishing a figure would either be a lie for most accounts or an instruction manual for abusing it.
So: expect a trial, do not plan your evening around a specific number of free minutes, and treat the allowance as a chance to see whether the service is for you at all.
You get a notice before billing starts
Billing does not begin silently. A notice appears on screen before it starts on a call, which is your cue to decide whether to carry on. Nobody should ever ask you for payment details inside a call itself — see the safety centre for why that request is a warning sign rather than a payment method.
Where the money is not going
Three things people assume are being charged for, and are not:
- Browsing. Looking at who is available costs nothing. So does reading every page on this site.
- Having an account. There is no membership fee sitting underneath the coins, and no subscription that renews whether you call or not.
- The camera check. It runs on your own device, costs nothing and needs no account.
What is charged is the call itself, while it is running. That is the whole billing surface.
Deciding what to top up
There is no clever answer here, but there is a practical one: buy enough that a conversation you are enjoying does not stop mid-sentence, and not so much that you are pre-committing to an evening you have not had yet.
The failure mode worth avoiding is the small top-up followed by a scramble. A call that ends because the balance ran out is the most annoying way for a good conversation to finish, and it is entirely avoidable.
When a charge looks wrong
Untouched purchases can be returned within 14 days. Coins you have already spent cannot — the calls they paid for happened. A duplicate charge, an amount you did not authorise, or coins that never arrived gets put right; so does a call that failed because of a fault at our end. The exact rules are in the terms, and to start one you write to support with the date and the amount.
Why paid services feel different from free ones
This is the part nobody writes down, so: on a free random service, the other person's incentive is to get through people, because the next one is free too. Attention is cheap on both sides, and both of you behave accordingly — that is why those conversations average about eleven seconds of eye contact.
When a call costs something, the maths inverts for everyone in it. You pick more carefully. She is talking to you rather than cycling. Neither of you is pressing next as a reflex. The money is not buying access so much as it is buying out the incentive to leave.
Whether that trade is worth it is a genuinely personal question, and plenty of people decide it is not. But it is the actual trade, and it is better to decide it with the mechanism in front of you than to find the first charge by surprise.
What this buys you
It is worth being clear about what the money is for, because it is not "access". It is a conversation with one person, who is there to have it, and who is not simultaneously talking to a room. Free random chat is free because your attention is the product and the next stranger is always one tap away. This is the opposite trade.