I actually tried a lot of similar apps before this — probably more than ten.
What really bothered me with many of the more popular ones was how aggressive they felt. Every time I opened the app, there was a paywall or some kind of upgrade pop-up. On top of that, I kept getting push notifications almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day. For me, that completely ruined the experience.
When I look for an AI chat app, I just want a clean space to talk. I don’t want to be constantly reminded to pay or pulled out of the conversation for commercial reasons. With Spark, I haven’t received any marketing pushes so far, no forced pop-ups, no pressure to upgrade. That alone already puts it ahead of a lot of others I tried.
It also feels calmer overall, and being able to create my own bot instead of using a fixed preset makes it feel less generic. I ended up sticking with it mostly because it doesn’t get in the way.