Is AI Cleaner Safe or Legit? A Real App With Ten Price Tags

$6.99 a week sounds small. Over a year it’s $363.48, and AI Cleaner’s own App Store listing also sells a yearly plan for $34.99. That gap, about ten to one, is the single most useful thing to know before you tap the free trial.

Our verdict is Caution. AI Cleaner is a legitimate app from a registered Spanish company, it’s on both official app stores, and it does find duplicate photos. It isn’t a scam. The problems are the weekly billing, ad tracking that sits awkwardly next to its privacy promises, and a cleanup tool that can remove more than you meant if you tap through too fast.

Last checked: October 3, 2026. How we checked this is explained near the end.

Which AI Cleaner this is (there are several)

Search the App Store for “AI Cleaner” and you’ll get a row of look-alike names from different developers. This review covers AI Cleaner: Clean Up Storage on iPhone and AI Cleaner, Phone Cleaner on Android, both published by GRIMLAX TRADE, S.L.

• The company: GRIMLAX TRADE, S.L., with a registered office on Calle Almogàvers in Barcelona, according to its terms of use, which also list a Spanish tax ID.
• iPhone: 4.6 stars from about 209,000 ratings and #167 in Utilities on the App Store listing when we checked. Version 6.0 came out on September 9.
• Android: 4.4 stars from about 326,000 reviews and more than 10 million downloads on Google Play, last updated September 22, 2026. The listing is marked “Contains ads”.
• Web payments: the terms name Primexpath Technologies LLC, a Miami company, as merchant of record, so a charge made on a website rather than through Apple or Google may show that name.

If the cleaner on your phone shows a different developer, most of the specifics below won’t apply to it.

The price list, with the yearly math done

Apple’s listing shows ten in-app purchases for this one app. Eight are weekly.

Which one you’re offered depends on the paywall the app shows you, and the terms say prices vary by country and can change without notice. Look at the pattern, though. The same “3 days free” label appears at $6.99, $9.99 and $10.99 a week. The cheapest yearly plan costs about the same as five weeks of the cheapest weekly one.

So if you decide to pay at all, pick a yearly plan. The weekly plans only make sense if you’ll clean once and cancel the same day.

Trials don’t always behave the way the button suggests, either. One Google Play reviewer in the UK wrote in August 2026 that they picked the 3-day trial and were charged £6.99 straight away, then cancelled and got a refund from Google Play. That’s one account, but it’s a good reason to check your receipt email the day you start.

AI Cleaner app reviews: where the complaints land

High star averages and angry reviews aren’t a contradiction here. Plenty of people say the cleanup works; the one-star reviews are mostly about money and about deletions. Three patterns stand out in the recent reviews on both stores.

Charges and ads people didn’t expect. Besides the trial case above, a Google Play reviewer in September 2026 said ads kept popping up every few seconds, that tapping one changed their whole home screen, and that they’d asked for a refund. The developer’s reply, there and elsewhere, is the same: refunds go through Google Play, not through GRIMLAX.

Deleting too much. An App Store reviewer wrote in May 2025 that the app removed most of their contacts, calendar entries and photos, and that its backup didn’t bring everything back. The developer answered that deleted photos sit in the Recently Deleted album for 30 days and that the app can only delete past calendar events, not upcoming ones. We can’t verify either side. Both statements tell you where to look if something goes missing.

Small results. Another September 2026 reviewer, a business owner, said it found only 88 pictures to delete on a phone that was nearly full.

On the other side, a June 2025 five-star review says the writer planned to cancel after three days and kept paying because the phone stopped lagging. Your experience will depend a lot on how messy your camera roll is.

Is AI Cleaner safe? What it sees on your phone, and what it shares

To do its job, AI Cleaner asks for your photo library, contacts and calendar. The Android email cleaner asks to read and manage Gmail. Its privacy policy (effective February 2026) says the company doesn’t store or use the content on your device and that the work happens on the phone or in your iCloud account. Apple’s privacy label mostly agrees: photos and videos are listed as data that may be collected but isn’t linked to you.

The advertising side is less tidy.

• Apple’s label lists Identifiers under “Data Used to Track You”, meaning they may be used to follow you across other companies’ apps and websites.
• The privacy policy says identifiers are shared with marketing partners including AppsFlyer, Meta and TikTok, and that ads run through AdMob and AppLovin MAX.
• The policy’s section for US users says the company doesn’t process location data. Earlier, the same policy lists your IP-based location and a location permission pop-up, and Google Play’s data safety section says the Android app may collect location data and share it with third parties.

None of that is unusual for a free-to-download utility. It does mean the App Store line “AI Cleaner does not store your personal information” is narrower than it sounds. It’s about your photos and contacts, not about you as an advertising profile.

Two quick fixes. When your iPhone asks whether AI Cleaner can track your activity, tap Ask App Not to Track; one App Store reviewer said they did exactly that and the cleanup still worked. If you connect Gmail on Android, you can remove that access afterwards from the Third-party apps and services page in your Google Account.

A safer way to run the cleanup

This is the part most reviews skip. Five minutes of setup makes a bad deletion recoverable.

1. Start with limited photo access. When iOS asks, choose Limited Access and pick a few albums. See what the scan suggests before you hand over the whole library.
2. Back up contacts before merging anything. If your iPhone contacts sync with iCloud, iCloud.com keeps archived copies you can restore under Data Recovery. Google Contacts has an “Undo changes” option that goes back up to 30 days.
3. Open every group before you confirm. “Similar” isn’t “duplicate”. Untick screenshots of receipts, tickets and anything you’d need to prove later.
4. Check Recently Deleted before you empty it. On iPhone, photos stay there for 30 days, and you won’t get the space back until they’re gone, so look through them once more first.
5. Write down the renewal date. Put a reminder two days before it, since the terms ask you to cancel at least 24 hours ahead.

Cancelling, and the refund rule that matters

Deleting the app doesn’t cancel the subscription. The terms say that in plain words.

• iPhone: Settings > your name > Subscriptions > AI Cleaner > Cancel Subscription.
• Android: Play Store > your profile picture > Payments & subscriptions > Subscriptions > AI Cleaner > Cancel subscription.
• Paid on a website: email [email protected] with the receipt, since that payment runs through Primexpath rather than Apple or Google.

GRIMLAX doesn’t give refunds itself. Its terms say every refund request is decided by Apple or Google, and if they say no, the company won’t refund either. The terms also say you give up the EU right of withdrawal because the service starts immediately. For an iPhone charge, request a refund at reportaproblem.apple.com; for Android, use Google Play’s refund request page. Ask quickly. A charge from yesterday is an easier conversation than one from three months ago.

Menus get moved around between OS versions, so these paths were correct when we checked on October 3, 2026 and may shift later.

Do you need a cleaner app at all?

For duplicate photos, often not. iOS 16 and later has a Duplicates album in the Photos app, under Utilities, that finds identical and near-identical shots and merges them for free. Settings > General > iPhone Storage shows which apps take the most space and can offload the ones you don’t use. On Android, Files by Google has a Clean tab for duplicate files, junk and large files.

If you’ve tried those and still want AI Cleaner’s extras, like the contact merger or the video compressor, buy the yearly plan and skip the weekly ones. Weekly billing behind a free trial is the same pattern we found with Use.AI and the Brain AI IQ app, and Finestro is another case where the price depends on where you buy.

FAQs