Why adult AI tools live outside the app stores, and how they get paid

Google’s rules for the Play Store contain a line that names an entire product category. Under its policy on sexual content, the store bans “apps that claim to undress people or see through clothing, even if labeled as prank or entertainment apps.” Apple’s guideline 1.1.4 is shorter and covers more ground, ruling out “overtly sexual or pornographic material” altogether. So every company building adult image tools starts from the same place. There will be no app and no in-app purchase button. Everything has to happen in a web browser.

The category is wider than the headlines about it suggest. It includes clothing removers, prompt-based photo editors, short video generators and face swap porn tools, where a user puts one face onto an adult scene. Many of these products are run by small teams renting GPUs, and people mostly find them through search, typing a generic term like NSFW AI rather than a brand name. Whether one of these companies lasts depends on how it reaches users and how it gets paid, and the rules for both are written by someone else.

Living without a store

Being shut out of the app stores changes more than the install button. A browser tool can’t send push notifications, so there’s no cheap way to bring a user back next week. There’s no store search either, which leaves organic search and word of mouth as the main sources of new users. A user who forgets the domain name is gone.

It also changes how the products are built. The whole interface has to work in a phone browser, since there’s no app to fall back on. Uploading a photo and paying for credits both have to fit on a small screen, without the system features a native app gets for free.

Getting paid is the hard part

The bigger problem is money. In April 2021 Mastercard published revised standards for adult content merchants, with an October 2021 compliance deadline. They require merchants to verify the age and identity of anyone who uploads content and to review it before it’s published. Complaints about non-consensual material have to be handled within seven business days. Those rules were written for sites that host videos uploaded by other people. An AI tool that makes a private image for one user and never publishes it doesn’t map neatly onto those categories, and banks that sign up adult merchants tend to read the rules cautiously.

How much power the payment side holds became public in July 2025. After an advocacy group wrote to Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and other processors, Steam added a rule against content that might break payment processor standards, and itch.io pulled adult games from its browse and search pages. Mastercard said it hadn’t required any of those restrictions, and Valve disputed that account.

For a small adult AI company the lesson was simple enough. A payment route can disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with its own customers, so the sensible setup is to offer several methods at once.

Local payment systems fill much of that gap. Brazil’s central bank launched Pix in November 2020, and the Bank of Russia runs a similar service called the Faster Payments System, or SBP. Both move money straight from one bank account to another, usually after the payer scans a QR code in their banking app, so no card network sits in the middle of the payment. Razdevai, for example, takes Pix in Brazil and SBP in Russia, with prices shown in reais and rubles and set below its dollar prices. For the user it feels like any other transfer from their bank app. For the tool it’s a route that doesn’t depend on how a card network feels about adult content that month.

Credits instead of subscriptions

Adult AI tools usually sell credits, and the reason is cost. Every image or video takes real GPU time, and videos take far more of it, so credits let the price follow the work. Razdevai’s pricing shows how this plays out. A new account gets 10 free credits, enough for one image. An image edit or a face swap costs 10 credits and a short video costs 30. If a generation fails because of an error on the service’s side, the credits are returned automatically.

Renewals are where tools differ. Razdevai’s plans are a single payment that lasts 30 days, a year or a lifetime depending on the tier, and nothing renews unless the user decides to buy again. For an adult service that’s a real selling point, because nobody wants a repeat charge turning up on a bank statement months after they stopped using the site. The trade-off is less predictable revenue for the company.

Privacy is what people are buying

Users are uploading personal photos to a service they may not want anyone to know they use. So the data policy ends up doing much of the selling, and it’s worth reading before choosing a tool. Razdevai’s, for example, says uploaded and generated images and videos are deleted automatically after three days. The most recent photo a user uploads is kept only in their own browser for reuse across tools, and it can be cleared from the account menu at any time.

The other half of trust is what a tool refuses to do. Google’s policy also bans “non-consensual sexual content created via deepfake or similar technology,” and that’s the reputational risk hanging over the whole category. Better-run services put checks in front of generation rather than after it. On Razdevai every uploaded photo goes through an automated age check before anything is made, and images that appear to show a minor are rejected and deleted. No automated filter catches everything, which is why the policies around it matter as much as the filter itself.

What this adds up to

The models in this category keep getting better and cheaper to run, and that’s the part of the business that’s easiest to plan for. The rules that decide which companies last are set by app stores and payment networks, and they change on those companies’ schedules. The tools still around in a few years will most likely be the ones that were built around those rules from the start.