RP Chatbot Platforms, and Who Owns Your Characters

Build a character on an rp chatbot platform, spend three months developing it, and the question nobody asks until it's too late is whose it is.

Three platforms were read on 29 July 2026 and they give three genuinely different answers. Talefy says that as between you and Talefy, you own all rights in the character. PolyBuzz says the opposite, stating that the platform owns the intellectual property rights in AI content generated during your use. HammerAI splits it, leaving you responsible for your content while granting the company, and separately every other user on the service, a perpetual irrevocable licence to anything you publish.

All three grants carry the same three words, incidentally. Perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide. That's standard platform boilerplate and it isn't sinister, but it does mean that on every one of these, publishing a character is a one-way door, and deleting your account does not close it.

Everything below came from the platforms' own terms pages and from Apple's public search endpoint, read the same day.

Three Platforms, Three Answers On Ownership

The ownership clause sits in the terms of service, usually about two thirds of the way down, under a heading like User Content. Nobody reads it. Here is what it says.

Terms pages read 29 July 2026. PolyBuzz's document carries a 1 June 2026 date, HammerAI's a 29 May 2026 date, and Talefy's shows a date field with no date filled in.

Read those three rows together and the difference is smaller than it looks, which is the actual finding. Talefy grants itself a licence broad enough to do essentially anything with your character forever, so ownership in that sentence is a technicality. PolyBuzz skips the technicality and says outright that it owns the output. The end state is close to identical. One of them is just more direct about it.

Talefy adds a wrinkle worth flagging. Its terms attribute AI-generated material to the platform as author and require you to credit it when you use the output publicly or commercially. So the character is yours, and the text it produced is attributed to somebody else, and if you wanted to turn a year of collaborative fiction into something you published under your own name you would be reading that clause very carefully.

What Publishing Actually Commits You To

The HammerAI clause is the one with the most reach, because it does not stop at the company.

Its terms grant HammerAI the usual bundle, meaning the right to use, display, create derivative works of, allow downloads of and distribute your content. Then they grant all other users a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, display, publish, reproduce and distribute it. So a published character is not shared with a platform. It's shared with everybody on the platform, permanently, on terms you cannot revoke.

That is exactly how a community character library is supposed to work and there's no other way to build one. The library only functions if the characters stay usable when their creators leave. Fine. The part worth knowing before you press publish is that publish means something stronger here than it does on a social network, where deleting a post generally deletes it.

Its privacy policy, last updated 29 March 2026, confirms the same thing from the other side. On account deletion, profile information and private characters and stories are permanently deleted, while characters and stories published publicly may remain on the platform, no longer associated with your account.

So the exit is partial by design. You leave. The character stays, orphaned.

PolyBuzz words its deletion differently and more finally, saying deletion of an account is irreversible and that personal information and use records cannot be retrieved, keeping only anonymised data. Talefy's is the friendliest on process and the least forgiving on money, letting you delete at any time without explanation while stating you are not entitled to a refund of the subscription amount.

None of the three publishes a way to export your conversations before any of that happens, which is a pattern across the whole category rather than a quirk of these three. The full version of that audit sits in the free companion exit comparison.

What Each Platform Bans, And How It Handles Age

Ownership is the clause nobody reads. The prohibited-content list is the clause everybody assumes they already know, and the three here are not the same document.

PolyBuzz sets an eighteen minimum in plain words, saying you must have reached eighteen to use the service and that it is strictly prohibited for minors worldwide. Its prohibited list covers pornography or sexual acts, child nudity and child sexual exploitation, hate speech targeting protected characteristics, illegal goods, and content intended to impersonate a person or brand with intent to mislead. Its own product pages add that public display of adult material is not permitted, which is a distinction between what a private conversation may contain and what appears in a browsable library.

Talefy is the strictest on identity. Its prohibitions include the usual list plus deepfakes or impersonation of any kind, stated without qualification. On age it goes further than a checkbox, telling under-eighteens not to sign up, separately calling out EU citizens and residents under eighteen, and stating that it will actively remove accounts suspected to belong to individuals under the age of 18. Suspicion as a trigger is a meaningfully different standard from self-declaration, and it is the only one of the three that describes any enforcement action at all.

HammerAI sets its floor at eighteen or the local age of consent, whichever is greater, requires users to acknowledge that the service contains mature material before proceeding, and names underage content, human trafficking and terrorism as zero-tolerance categories. The detailed rules sit in a separate Content Guidelines document rather than in the terms.

Two observations from putting them side by side.

None of the three describes an age assurance step. Document checks, facial age estimation, mobile operator lookups, that family of methods, all of it absent, which means the eighteen floors above are assertions the user makes rather than facts anyone established. Talefy's remove-on-suspicion language is the closest thing to enforcement in the set, and it is reactive by construction.

And the impersonation clauses are doing more work than they used to. Two of the three now name likeness or deepfakes explicitly, which reads as a response to pressure rather than as an original drafting choice, and the same clause has been appearing across the adult end of the category too. Where it comes from, and which operators attach a turnaround time to it, is set out in the audit of content removal policies.

The Shelf This Search Actually Returns

Apple returns 46 results for this term, and the composition explains why advice about rp chatbots is so inconsistent.

Twenty-five file under Entertainment. Eleven file under Productivity, which is where general assistants live, so a quarter of what comes back is not a roleplay product at all. Five file under Social Networking, two under Games, and one each under Health and Fitness, Lifestyle and Education.

The age spread is wider than any romance-focused search produces. Thirty-three carry 17+, seven carry 12+, and six carry 4+. Compare that with the free girlfriend search, where all 39 results carry 17+ without exception, and you can see the term is being used by two different populations.

That last row is the one that stops you. Exactly one of the 46 costs money to download, at 99 cents, and it is a listing first released in July 2010 whose most recent update landed on 11 January 2015. Eleven years without a build, still installable, still returned by the search.

It isn't alone in the tail. A chat app released in March 2011 last shipped an update in September 2017 and carries 6,601 ratings. A roleplay product with 21,091 ratings has not been updated since May 2024. Eight of the 46 have gone more than a year.

Stale matters more here than in most software. A roleplay product is a thin interface over a hosted model, the model gets deprecated and replaced every few months, and an app nobody is maintaining is an app whose provider integration is either frozen or quietly broken. What the screenshots advertise and what the thing does can drift a long way apart without a single visible change to the listing.

What The Only Editorial Page Measured

One editorial page ranks for this query, and it's worth auditing because it's the closest thing to independent coverage the search offers.

It covers eight products, published 9 July 2026, and it does state a method, saying each bot got three to six days of sustained sessions with deliberate plot twists introduced to test character consistency, improvisation and memory. That's real work and more than most competing pages do.

What it doesn't do is disclose. Every outbound product link carries an affiliate identifier in the query string, and no disclosure statement appears anywhere on the page. Prices are given in ranges rather than figures, with a general band of ten to thirty dollars a month and no date attached to any of them. No context window appears. No model is named. Its own note on privacy is that reading the policies was boring, followed by a recommendation to prefer platforms with third-party verification, with no links to the policies in question.

Its sharpest line is that most of these platforms claim they can handle immersive storytelling and cannot, which is probably true and is also the whole reason the memory specification matters. That argument, with the published numbers attached, is worked through in the roleplay memory comparison.

The other pages on the search are the products themselves, plus a Reddit thread at position one which this tooling cannot load, so nothing is claimed here about what's inside it.

Questions People Ask

Can you move a character between platforms? No import path exists between any two of these that could be found, and a character is a text description plus a conversation history in a database you don't control. Switching means rebuilding.

Does the platform read your chats? The three terms here describe rights over content rather than practices, which is a different question. Retention and training terms across the larger companion products are compared in the main companion guide.

Is a published character still yours if you delete your account? On HammerAI the published copy stays and stops being attributed to you. On PolyBuzz the platform's position is that it owns the generated content regardless. Neither will remove it because you asked nicely.

Why do these platforms live on the web rather than in app stores? Store content rules and the commission, mostly. The browser-first pattern and the naming confusion it creates are documented in the roleplay platform audit.

Are the general assistants in these results usable for roleplay? Technically yes, and they carry no character library, no persona persistence and much stricter default moderation, so they are a different product wearing the same search term.

What should a first check be? The terms page, specifically the User Content section, which takes about three minutes and settles the ownership question before you have anything worth arguing about.

Where To Start

Keep private what you intend to keep. On every platform here, publishing is the irreversible act, not creating, and a character you never publish sits in the deletable half of the account.

Then read the ownership clause of whichever platform you're leaning toward, and treat the licence wording as the operative text rather than the ownership sentence above it. Perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable together mean the same thing on all three of these regardless of who the terms say owns what.

Then, if the story matters to you more than the platform does, write it somewhere you control as you go. There's no export button anywhere in this category, the products fail at a rate that would be alarming in any other software market, and a copy in a text file on your own machine is the only version of this that nobody can take back.