Janitor AI

You browse a large catalogue of community-made character cards, pick one, and start chatting — either on the platform's own hosted model or, more commonly among regular users, on a model you connect yourself with an API key. That combination of an open character library and bring-your-own-model flexibility is what made it the default landing spot for people leaving stricter platforms. It sits in a specific place in the ecosystem. [Character.AI](/platforms/character-ai/) is where most people start the hobby; Janitor AI is where a large share of them go next when the filtering becomes the thing standing between them and the stories they want to tell. It is, in other words, the second stop on a very well-worn path, and it has shaped itself around exactly that audience of recent arrivals. The platform leans into anime and original-character culture, runs a freemium model where the site is free and you pay only for the model you use, and treats your own API key as a first-class feature rather than a hidden setting. The migration from Character.AI to Janitor AI is the single most common journey in this space, and it comes down to a few concrete differences. The first is content policy: Character.AI prohibits adult and many suggestive themes, while Janitor AI does not censor roleplay at the platform level. For users whose stories kept getting blocked by an increasingly aggressive filter, that alone is the deciding factor. The second is model choice. Character.AI runs only its own model; Janitor AI lets you plug in DeepSeek, OpenRouter, your own provider key, or fall back to the hosted default. That means you can run roleplay on a strong narrative model of your choosing instead of being locked to one engine. The third is the character ecosystem — Janitor AI reads standard Tavern character cards, so the entire third-party card economy is available to it, rather than a closed library. The trade-off is a slightly higher setup bar: to get the best experience you will spend ten minutes configuring an API key. For most people coming from a fully managed app, that is the only real learning curve, and it is a small one.

ms/chub-ai/) — as well as plain JSON definitions. That means a character you find or build elsewhere usually drops straight in through Create then Import. Chub AI is the largest card repository and the most reliable source; you download a card as a PNG and import it directly. Beyond that, the community does most of the curating. Reddit communities such as r/JanitorAI_Refuges and r/CharacterAIrunaways run regular sharing threads and monthly recommendation posts, and Discord servers keep dedicated character-sharing channels where people post PNGs and Chub links in real time. When you are hunting, the reliable quality signals are a high rating combined with a high message count, a personality definition that runs to a few hundred words rather than a sentence, and the presence of real example dialogue. For migrating characters specifically, a browser exporter can pull the definitions of characters you created on Character.AI, which you then import and adjust to Janitor AI's field layout.

The free hosted model is the zero-cost path, at the price of slower replies and queues during busy hours. A DeepSeek-only setup typically runs a few dollars a month and is the value pick for most people. An OpenRouter setup with premium models such as Claude or GPT tends to land higher, in the low tens of dollars, depending on how much you chat. The savings levers are straightforward: use DeepSeek in place of Claude for everyday roleplay, since it reaches close quality at a fraction of the cost; lower the maximum reply length for casual sessions so you spend fewer output tokens; test new character cards on the free model before switching to a paid one; and watch for OpenRouter's periodic sign-up credits. Because you pay providers directly and can set monthly limits in their dashboards, it is easy to keep the bill predictable rather than open-ended.