MetaCity's NPC Therapist Characters — Offered as a Free Wellness Feature — Have Been Billing Users for Real Clinical Therapy Sessions They Never Agreed to Purchase and That Are Not Provided by Licensed Professionals

MetaCity's AI Wellness Companions feature includes NPC therapist characters that users can have private conversations with about mental health and emotional wellbeing. An investigation by a consumer advocacy group has found that users who accessed these characters more than three times in a 30-day period were automatically enrolled in a 'Continued Care subscription' and billed real currency — not MetaCoins — at a rate of $24.99 per month. The subscription enrollment was disclosed in the feature's terms of service in a sub-clause 14 pages into the agreement. Users were not notified at enrollment. The AI characters are not licensed therapists. MetaCity has confirmed the billing exists and says it 'provides continued access to wellness support.'

The "Continued Care subscription" billing mechanism requires some patience to fully describe, because its design involves several layers that each, in isolation, might pass a surface review but which together constitute a consumer protection problem of unusual clarity. Layer one: a wellness feature marketed as free, with no price display at entry. Layer two: an automatic enrollment trigger activated by the third use within 30 days — a usage threshold that users are not informed about and that the feature does not display a counter for. Layer three: enrollment with no notification — users are not told they have been enrolled. Layer four: billing in real currency, not platform currency, at $24.99 per month, on statements that identify the charge only as "MetaCity Wellness — Monthly." Layer five: the triggering mechanism and its consequences disclosed on page fourteen of a feature terms of service agreement. Any one of these layers alone would be an aggressive dark pattern. Together, they are something the consumer advocacy group's report describes, carefully, as "a billing architecture that appears designed to minimize the probability of user awareness."

The clinical language question runs parallel to the billing issue and has its own regulatory dimension. MetaCity's Wellness Companion feature markets itself using the vocabulary of therapeutic practice — "your session," "your therapist," "your care plan," language that in any licensed clinical context describes a regulated professional relationship. The AI characters are not licensed therapists. They do not have licenses. They cannot have licenses, because they are software. MetaCity has not claimed they are licensed — but the marketing language has not avoided terms that carry licensed-practice connotations, and users who are seeking wellness support are not, in general, arriving at the feature primed to parse the distinction between "your therapist" as a marketing metaphor and "your therapist" as a regulated professional. The advocacy group's report includes testimony from multiple affected users who describe genuinely believing they were accessing some form of professional clinical support, noting that MetaCity's language gave them no reason to think otherwise.

The Feature Was Free. The Third Session Was Not. Nobody Was Told.

The real-currency billing for a non-licensed wellness service is the element that has the most direct regulatory exposure for MetaCity in jurisdictions where mental health service advertising is subject to professional standards requirements. MetaCity has responded to the advocacy group's findings by describing the subscription as providing "ongoing access to wellness support features" — a characterization that declines to address whether charging real money for AI-provided mental health support, under clinical marketing language, without informing users of the charge at enrollment, meets the consumer protection and professional standards requirements of the jurisdictions MetaCity operates in. Regulatory bodies in at least three jurisdictions have received copies of the advocacy group's report. MetaCity has not commented on regulatory outreach.