Janitor AI Alternatives, Sorted by What You'd Give Up

Janitor AI's own help centre puts its free model's memory at around 9,000 tokens. That number is why most people go looking for Janitor AI alternatives, and it's also the number every alternative has to beat.

Direct answer first. Janitor gives you three things at once that no hosted competitor matches. Unlimited free chats on a house model with a published context of roughly 9k tokens. A documented way to plug in your own model through a proxy. And a web version with no content filter beyond the site's rules. Chub AI keeps the proxy and the lack of a filter but publishes no free context number. SpicyChat publishes its entire context ladder and its prices, but took away your own API key in November 2025 and starts free users at 4,096 tokens. SillyTavern keeps all three and adds the one thing Janitor's own help centre doesn't document, a way to take your chats with you, provided you'll run it yourself. And the option most roundups skip is that the thing people leave Janitor over, the memory, is fixable from inside Janitor with a proxy or its new Router without leaving at all.

Every number below was read from each platform's own help centre, docs or store listing on 15 September 2026. Janitor's main site returned 403 to every request, so its help desk is the source for Janitor.

What Janitor Actually Gives You

Nobody ranking alternatives quotes Janitor's own spec, which makes it hard to say what an alternative would cost you. Here's the spec.

The free tier, per the subscription FAQ updated 25 June 2026, is unlimited chats with the bot library, access to standard chat models, and a context limit "of around 9k tokens". The same page says a free option will always exist. The memory article puts the house model, JLLM, at "around 8k-9k tokens, give or take". Two articles, one figure.

Janitor+ adds "5x more context", priority access, monthly swipes on the best models, a golden username and comment reactions. The help page names no price. The App Store listing does, at $12.99 a month for Janitor+ Monthly, which is the only published figure I could find for it. If the multiplier applies to the 9k number, that's a context ceiling somewhere near 45,000 tokens, and I'm labelling that as my arithmetic on their two figures rather than a number they've printed.

Then the proxy. Janitor's glossary describes JLLM as the default "unless you've hooked up an external one via API", and the help centre carries a two-part beginner's guide plus a quickstart for routing chats through OpenRouter to DeepSeek. This isn't a workaround the community found. It's a documented feature with its own error guide.

Two more things belong on the sheet. The mobile app, released 29 November 2025 and now listed as "Janitor: Interactive Stories" with an 18+ rating, ships in Safe Mode by default, with NSFW bots hidden and the model tuned to safe replies until you flip a setting on the website. And since April and June 2026, users connecting from Australia, Brazil and the UK go through age verification with k-ID, which Janitor says returns only a yes-or-no answer.

The Four Things You'd Be Giving Up

Sort the alternatives by which of Janitor's three properties each one keeps, add the one Janitor doesn't document, and the list gets short.

Read from each platform's docs, README or store listing on 2026-09-15.

Two things jump out. The only hosted platform that keeps the proxy is Chub. And the only hosted platform that tells you its free context in tokens is SpicyChat, at less than half of Janitor's figure. The one route that keeps all three properties and documents portability on top is software you install rather than a site you visit, and that's the trade this whole search is really about.

Chub, If the Proxy Is the Point

Chub's getting-started page says it plainly. "Chub is uncensored. We do not restrict in any meaningful capacity the variety of characters that are allowed to be posted on the platform nor the type of interactions you are allowed to have with said characters."

Its API page lists what you can connect. OpenAI and Anthropic with a key or a reverse proxy, Kobold or Ooba for a model on your own machine, OpenRouter, Google and NovelAI. Or Mars, the house model, at $20 a month with unlimited messaging. The same page recommends official keys over community reverse proxies and gives the reason, which is that a reverse proxy "may enable logging, leak your information, and use stolen API keys which you have no control over". That's the most honest paragraph on proxies I've read from any platform, including Janitor's.

Chats export as JSONL for SillyTavern, as PNG or as text, so your history leaves with you, which is rare. What I couldn't find is a free-tier context number or a message cap on the docs pages that loaded, and the subscription page renders nothing without JavaScript. So Chub keeps three of the four properties for certain and I can't tell you about the fourth from its own documents.

One line in the character creation guide says something about the category. On avatars, it asks creators to avoid NSFW images "whenever possible, it spooks the payment processors". Uncensored on text, cautious on pictures, and it tells you why.

SpicyChat, If You Want the Ladder Published

SpicyChat is the opposite trade. It gives you fewer of Janitor's properties and documents every one it does give.

Prices rose on 8 September 2026, a week before I looked. Monthly tiers are now $5.95 for Get A Taste, $19.95 for True Supporter and $29.95 for I'm All In, up from $5.00, $14.95 and $24.95. Annual is $60, $199.95 and $299.95. Existing subscribers keep their old price as long as the plan stays active and unchanged, and the FAQ is explicit that any change, including a downgrade, moves you to current pricing. If you read a review quoting $14.95, it predates the change.

The context ladder is the reason to consider it. Free and Get A Taste are 4,096 tokens. True Supporter is 8,192. I'm All In is 16,384. Reply length is capped at 180 tokens on the bottom two tiers and 300 on the top two. SpicyChat's own worked example says a 1,000-token character plus messages of about 150 tokens leaves room for "around 20 recent messages" on the free tier. That's the platform telling you its free memory is short, in numbers, which I respect more than Janitor's "around 9k" and Chub's silence.

The catch for anyone coming from Janitor is in an archived doc page. Using your own OpenAI key with SpicyChat "has been sunset on Nov 17th, 2025". There's no proxy. You get the models SpicyChat runs, which its FAQ counts at more than ten across tiers, and the context those models get is "limited by the package you are subscribed to". Character cards do import, as PNG or JSON, and the FAQ asks that imported bots stay private.

Two more things. There's no iOS app, since Apple removed it in August 2025, and the Android app is an APK from SpicyChat's own site rather than Google Play. And age verification applies in France, the UK, Italy, Australia and 26 named US states, with NSFW content locked until you pass. The wider set of places to go from SpicyChat is its own article, the SpicyChat alternatives comparison.

SillyTavern and Risu, If You'd Rather Own the Front End

The honest answer to "what keeps everything Janitor does" is a program, and SillyTavern's docs describe it without much marketing. "A locally installed user interface that allows you to interact with text generation LLMs, image generation engines, and TTS voice models." It began in February 2023 as a fork of TavernAI, has more than 300 contributors, is licensed AGPL-3.0, and "will always be free and open-sourced".

It runs on anything with Node.js 20 or newer. If you want the model on the same machine, the docs suggest a 3000-series NVIDIA card with at least 6 GB of VRAM. If you don't, you connect it to a backend, and the API page names OpenAI, Claude, OpenRouter, KoboldCpp, llama.cpp, Ollama, NovelAI, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek, TabbyAPI and AI Horde, the last of which the docs offer for "instant out-of-the-box chatting". There's an Android install path through Termux.

The whole thing is built around character cards, the docs say, which is the portable format whose specification is walked through in the character creation breakdown. And the docs contain the single most useful sentence about memory in this entire category. On a 2,048-token context, "a 1000-token character definition cuts the AI's 'memory' in half". That's true on every platform in the table above, and only SillyTavern bothers to tell you.

Risu is the same idea with a different shape. Its README calls it "a cross platform AI chatting software / web application" and lists OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, DeepInfra, Ooba and OpenRouter as supported, with lorebooks and its own memory compression. The website renders nothing without JavaScript, so the README is what I can cite.

My concern with this route isn't the setup. It's that you're now the one paying the model bill per token, and a long roleplay at 45,000 tokens of context on a paid cloud model gets expensive in a way a $12.99 subscription doesn't. The maths for that trade, with published per-token costs, is worked through in the roleplay memory guide.

Character.AI, If the Filter Is the Point

It's in the table because people ask, and the answer is short. Character.AI keeps none of Janitor's properties. No external model, no published context, no documented export, and a filter, which for a lot of Janitor's users was the reason they arrived.

What it has is scale and memory tooling. The subscription page prices c.ai+ at $94.99 a year, struck through from $119.88, which divides to $9.99 a month. Paid accounts get 30 memory pins against 15 free, no ads and no slow mode. Memory is described in adjectives rather than tokens, so "better than 9k" isn't a claim anyone can check. The mirror image of this article, what leaving Character.AI costs, is in the Character AI alternatives guide.

The Alternative That Isn't Leaving

Here's the part the roundups leave out, and I think it's the most useful part.

The complaint driving this search is memory, and Janitor's own answer to memory is the proxy. The quickstart has you make an OpenRouter account, create a key, open API Settings in any chat, add a configuration with a model name and the OpenRouter URL, and save. Janitor's guide, last updated in August 2025, describes OpenRouter's free tier as 50 messages a day, resetting at midnight UTC, with a one-time $10 top-up raising that to 1,000 a day. That's Janitor's description of another company's policy on that date, so check OpenRouter's page before relying on either figure. But the shape holds. The library, the site and the free JLLM fallback all stay, and the model that reads your chat changes.

Since 31 July 2026 there's also the Router. For Janitor+ subscribers, on the web only, it puts third-party models inside Janitor with no external proxy and no key to paste, shows the per-token cost and context limit of each model before you start, bills from a wallet you top up, and gives subscribers a $5 launch credit and 10% off some popular models. Mobile support is described as planned. Janitor's own page says the Router is "not a replacement for JLLM+" and that JLLM+ remains the recommended everyday model, which is a strange sentence to write about your own premium feature and a refreshingly honest one.

Put the numbers side by side and the case for staying gets stronger than I expected.

Janitor's paid tier, on its own published multiplier, delivers close to three times SpicyChat's top context at under half the price. Whether JLLM at 45k tokens writes as well as SpicyChat's SpicyXL at 16k is a quality question I can't answer from documents, and I'm not going to pretend I chatted with both for a month. On memory, which is the number people actually complain about, the sheet favours staying.

Questions

What's the best NSFW alternative to Janitor AI? Chub if you want a hosted site with your own model behind it, SpicyChat if you want a hosted site with a published memory ladder, SillyTavern if you want everything and will install it. All three state 18 as the floor and Chub is the only one that uses the word uncensored about itself.

Character AI or Janitor AI? They answer different questions. One is filtered with memory pins, the other is unfiltered with a token number. If the filter was your reason for leaving Character.AI, going back doesn't fix anything.

Is anything better than Janitor AI? On memory alone, SpicyChat's top tier, Chub with a large cloud model, or SillyTavern with anything. On memory per dollar, Janitor+ beats all of them on its own published figures.

Which alternatives support a proxy? Chub, SillyTavern and Risu. SpicyChat no longer does. Character.AI never did.

Which are free? Janitor itself, SillyTavern and Risu as software, Chub's free tier with limits I couldn't read, SpicyChat's 4,096-token free tier, and AI Horde as a free backend for the front ends.

Are AI chatbots illegal? No. The closest thing to a legal restriction is age verification, which Janitor now requires in three countries and SpicyChat in four countries plus 26 US states.

Which alternatives generate images? SpicyChat's Conversation Images from True Supporter up, and Chub's docs list image generation. Janitor's help centre describes none.

How I'd Choose

Try the proxy before you try an alternative. It costs nothing to set up, Janitor documents it better than any competitor documents the equivalent, and it addresses the exact complaint that sent you searching. If a free OpenRouter model at midnight UTC isn't enough, the $12.99 tier with 5x context is the next cheapest step and it keeps your library.

If you leave, leave for a reason the table shows. Chub for a proxy on a hosted site. SpicyChat for a memory ladder you can read in tokens, accepting that the top rung is 16k and the price went up last week. SillyTavern when you've decided the front end should be yours, which is the only route where nothing you build can be taken down by a licensing change or a payment processor.

And export first. Chub writes chats out as JSONL, which its own docs label as the SillyTavern format, and as PNG. Janitor's help centre doesn't describe a chat export that I could find, so whatever you've written there, copy it out by hand before you go.