The most common complaint about picking a character chat service is not the writing quality. It is not knowing what you are going to pay until you have already created an account.
That is worth being concrete about. When ClickTug assessed SpicyChat, every
price we could find for it appeared on third-party review sites rather than on
spicychat.ai itself. That is why it is not listed here, and it is a useful
thing to know before you compare it against anything: a figure quoted on a
review site is a figure nobody has to honour.
So this page ranks alternatives by the one thing you can check before you commit, which is the price the vendor prints themselves.
Ranked by published price
| Tool | From | Free tier | Card at signup |
|---|---|---|---|
| DreamGen | 7.83 dollars | Yes | No |
| Uncensored Chat | 9 dollars | Yes | No |
| 976.ai | 10.99 dollars | Yes, renews daily | No |
| Honeybot | 11.99 dollars | Yes | No |
| Backyard AI | 12 dollars | Yes | No |
| Kindroid | 15.99 dollars | Yes | No |
Every figure above was read from the vendor’s own pricing page, and each listing records the date it was last checked. Prices in this category change often, so treat the verification date as part of the fact.
DreamGen, 7.83 dollars
The cheapest published price here, and built for story and roleplay writing rather than chat that happens to run long.
It also states its position on model training more clearly than anything else in this directory: off by default, opt-in only, and the vendor says plainly that withdrawing consent cannot un-train a model that has already learned. Most vendors in this category do not address the question at all.
Read the full DreamGen assessment
Uncensored Chat, 9 dollars
Unfiltered chat at a low published price, with API access arriving at the middle tier if you want to build against it rather than only use the browser.
Read the full Uncensored Chat assessment
976.ai, 10.99 dollars
Worth looking at for the free tier before the price. It is permanent, it renews every day, and it covers the entire character roster with voice messages included, so you can evaluate the actual product rather than a demo.
The paid tiers are priced sensibly against each other too: three times the tokens for under twice the money as you go up, which is the opposite of how tiering usually works here.
Read the full 976.ai assessment
Honeybot, 11.99 dollars
Names its operating company, states which courts hear a dispute, and runs card payments through one processor and cryptocurrency through another. That redundancy matters more in this category than in most, because card processors withdraw from adult services at short notice. The refund positions differ between the two payment routes and the terms say so, which is more transparency than the average here.
Read the full Honeybot assessment
Backyard AI, 12 dollars
The deepest authoring controls on this page: lorebooks, author’s notes, response grammars and exposed model parameters, with the free tier carrying the same context window as the paid plan.
Worth knowing that its reputation is out of date. Backyard was formerly Faraday.dev and is still widely described as a local app. Its own download page says that desktop app is deprecated and unsupported, and the live product is a cloud service.
Read the full Backyard AI assessment
Kindroid, 15.99 dollars
The most expensive here and the only one with persistent memory and voice, which is what you want if the appeal is a character who knows you rather than a scenario you restart. It is also on web, iOS and Android at once, which is unusual given both app stores restrict adult content.
Kindroid uses third-party age verification rather than a checkbox. That is a real signal about how the vendor operates, and it also means signup asks more of you than the others here.
Read the full Kindroid assessment
What to check besides price
The monthly figure is the start of the question. Two others decide what you actually get, and both are recorded on every listing:
What a free account includes. Almost no vendor in this category documents message limits, image allowances or companion counts. They are learned by hitting them.
What happens to what you write. Retention periods, whether the vendor trains on your content, and whether deletion is self-serve or requires emailing support. Most policies here do not address training either way, which is why ClickTug records it as not documented rather than as a no.
More comparisons: NSFW AI chatbots and apps and AI roleplay chatbots.