NovelAI is the elder statesman of AI fiction. It was built in 2021 by people fleeing the AI Dungeon filter fiasco, and it earned trust the hard way: no content filter, unlimited generations at a flat price, and client-side encryption so the company cannot read your stories. That last part is still rare in this space, and it's genuinely to their credit.

We're not going to pretend NovelAI is bad. It's a serious product with a loyal community and five years of consistent policy behind it. What we will do is explain what changed over the last year, and who each tool serves now.

What changed at NovelAI

For years, NovelAI trained its own storytelling models. That era ended. In October 2025 they moved every tier to GLM-4.6 — a strong open-weights model — and in March 2026 shipped Xialong, their own finetune of it, exclusive to the $25 Opus tier. It was a reasonable engineering call: keeping pace with frontier labs on your own GPUs stopped being possible.

But it defines the ceiling. NovelAI's best model is a finetune of an open-weights model. It does not offer Claude, Gemini, or Grok at any price. If you've read prose from a frontier model recently, you know that gap is real — the pacing, the subtext, the sentence-level choices. It's the difference you feel ten turns in, when the scene either deepens or starts repeating itself.

Flat subscription vs pay-as-you-go

NovelAI's pricing is honest and simple: $10, $15, or $25 a month, unlimited text generation. If you write for hours every single day, that math is hard to beat, and we won't pretend otherwise.

Underfiction is pay-as-you-go. You buy credits, you spend them on the words you generate, and they never expire. If you write a few evenings a week, you'll likely spend less than a subscription. If you write heavily every day, you may spend more — but you're spending it on frontier models that no subscription anywhere will sell you for fiction.

Privacy, honestly compared

NovelAI encrypts stories client-side, which means their servers hold ciphertext they cannot open. For stored stories, that is the stronger guarantee, full stop.

Underfiction takes a different route to a similar place: stories are local by default — there is no server copy at all unless you enable Story Sync, and synced copies are encrypted at rest. On top of that, inference runs through Venice, which separates your account identity from your prompts before they reach a model. Different architectures, same instinct. Both are miles ahead of the platforms that keep your fiction in plaintext next to your email address.

So which one?

If you write many hours a day, want anime image generation, or client-side-encrypted cloud storage is your deciding factor — NovelAI remains a good product, and switching would gain you little.

If prose quality is the point — if you want the models that currently write the best fiction, inside a tool that manages scene memory for you — that's what Underfiction is for. Import your lorebooks and characters as world books and TavernCards and see whether the difference reads as clearly to you as it does to us.

Underfiction is interactive storytelling under your direction. Stories are local by default; sync is optional and encrypted. New accounts start with 500 free credits.