Friend is back with a speaker, a $249 price tag and a $10 monthly fee for memory. For an AI pendant sold as companionship, that subscription is the story.
Avi Schiffmann's startup relaunched Friend on July 30, 2026, and the product is no longer just a white disc that listens and texts you back. As The Verge and Wired reported, the new pendant has a built-in speaker, fixed randomized voices and personalities, and a price of $249. That is a steep jump from the $129 price attached to the first Friend hardware before this relaunch, and even further from the $99 preorder price TechCrunch reported when Friend first appeared in July 2024. The new monthly charge is $10 if you want the device to remember conversations for longer than 30 days. That is the pitch. It is also the bill.
The Necklace New York Already Hated #
You may have seen Friend before you knew its name. It was the white plastic pendant plastered across New York's subway system in 2025, after Schiffmann spent more than $1 million on a print campaign with more than 11,000 subway car ads, 1,000 platform posters and 130 urban panels, according to TechCrunch's writeup of Adweek's reporting. Some stations, including West 4th Street, were covered with the ads. New Yorkers did what New Yorkers do. They wrote on them.
Fortune reported that the posters quickly picked up messages including 'AI doesn't care if you live or die' and 'Surveillance capitalism.' TechCrunch noted other ads were tagged with 'get real friends.' Schiffmann didn't pretend to be wounded by the backlash. Fortune quoted him saying, 'The audience completes the work,' and describing the vandalized campaign as part of the point. That comment tells you a lot about this founder's operating style. Provoke first, sell into the attention after.
The 2.0 update is a real hardware change, not a new label on the same puck. The first Friend replied through an iPhone app. The new one talks out loud, and Wired reported that each pendant now arrives with its own locked-in voice and personality. You don't get to change its name. You don't get to change its voice. You buy the object, then you live with the version of companionship it shipped with.
But the speaker is not the hard part of this story. The memory fee is. A one-time gadget sale has become a $249 purchase with an optional subscription that feels much less optional once you remember what the product is supposed to be. A companion that forgets what you told it after 30 days is not really a companion. It is a reset button on a string.
The Graveyard Is Already Crowded #
Friend is entering a category that has already burned through a lot of patience. Humane launched the AI Pin at $699 with a $24 monthly subscription, then cut the price before HP bought most of Humane's assets for $116 million in February 2025. TechCrunch reported that the AI Pin stopped connecting to Humane's servers on February 28, 2025, which meant calling, messaging and AI queries stopped working. Reuters reported the same shutdown and sale. Customers did not get a graceful ending.
Rabbit took a different route and still ran into the same wall. The R1 cost $199, sold quickly after CES 2024, and Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu told Forbes in June 2024 that the company had sold 130,000 units worldwide. Then the reviews landed. Engadget called it a $199 AI toy that failed at almost everything, while Tom's Guide told readers to avoid it after bugs, wrong answers, poor battery life and a general sense that the device couldn't do what it promised. By November 2025, Tom's Guide reported that several Rabbit employees and contractors had not been paid for months. That is not a healthy hardware story.
So Friend's move is blunt. It is charging more upfront than before and charging again for the one feature that gives the device any emotional continuity. You can call that sustainable pricing if you want. Frankly, it also reads like a company that has studied the wreckage around it and decided there is no cheap version of always-on AI companionship.
There is one stronger detail in Wired's reporting that the subway debate missed. Schiffmann said he sold the first run of 5,000 pendants and wants to sell 50,000 of the second version. He also told Wired the product will probably not be available in the European Union because GDPR compliance would be too expensive. That is a useful reality check. Friend is loud in public, but its next test is boring and exacting: units sold, retention, refunds, support costs and whether people keep paying after the novelty drains out.
You should be skeptical of any AI wearable that says it can replace part of human company with a pendant and a cloud bill. Friend may be more honest than most because the economics are sitting right there on the product page. The speaker makes it feel more alive. The subscription reminds you who is paying to keep it that way.
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