JanitorAI is free. Actually free — not "free trial" free, not "free with ads" free. You go to the site, pick a character from a huge community library, and start chatting. No credit card. For a lot of people, that's the end of the conversation. Free wins.

So why would anyone pay for something else?

What free gets you

JanitorAI's free tier runs JanitorLLM — believed to be a fine-tuned Mistral variant trained on fanfiction. The output is functional. Characters respond, the conversation moves forward. But the prose is thin. Short sentences, reactive dialogue, minimal description. It defaults to a flirtatious tone regardless of context.

You can bring your own OpenAI API key for better responses, but at that point "free" becomes "pay OpenAI directly." Most users stick with the free tier.

The community library is genuinely large. Thousands of characters across every genre and fandom. Social discovery — ratings, chat counts, categories — makes browsing fun. If you want to hop between different characters and keep things casual, it works well.

What free costs you

• Your stories live on their servers. Employees can access them. Policies can change. Breaches expose everything.
• The model quality gap is real. JanitorAI's free models can't produce scene-setting, interiority, or literary prose. If you care about writing quality, you'll feel the difference immediately.
• No long-form structure. There's no scene management, no context compression, no summarization. Long conversations degrade as the context window fills up and old messages get silently dropped.
• Content policy is a moving target. JanitorAI is more permissive than Character.AI, but their boundaries depend on the model tier and can shift with policy updates.

Different products, different purpose

JanitorAI is a character chat platform. You browse characters, pick one, and have a conversation. Underfiction is a fiction engine. You build or choose a world, populate it with characters, and write stories that are structured as scenes with automatic context management.

Underfiction uses frontier models — Opus, GPT, Gemini, Grok — through Venice, prompted for literary prose. Because these models run through Venice rather than the official APIs, they follow creative direction more faithfully — the same model that might refuse a scene via the Anthropic or OpenAI API will write it as directed through Venice. Stories stay locally in your browser unless you enable Story Sync. Your identity is separated from prompts at the infrastructure level. Story Sync lets you pick up on another device while storing synced copies encrypted at rest. You can also import and export characters as TavernCard V2 PNGs — fully compatible with SillyTavern, ChubAI, and the wider ecosystem. You pay for tokens. New accounts get free credits to try it.

If you want free character chat and the quality is good enough — JanitorAI. Genuinely. It's the right tool for that.

If you opened a JanitorAI response and thought "I wish this read like an actual book" — that's the gap Underfiction fills.