Last year, we were searching for the perfect platform.
This year, we're searching for one that won't betray us.
Primarily Gen Z. Definitely not tourists.
"I was too scared to roleplay with people and found it fun to try multiple different spins on the same scenario."
"thought it would be a fun way to get back into writing via a roleplay"
"i wanted to bully characters from media i liked; this quickly turned into wanting to bang characters from media i liked"
Worse beats better by 3 to 1. "Much worse" is the single most-chosen answer in the entire survey, ahead of every optimistic option combined. That makes this the most important market signal on the page. Dissatisfaction here is hardening.
"Profit over people."
"Would say they're too profit driven and the money finally got to their heads. I mean look at chai bro."
"They are money oriented, that means they don't listen to users, only do everything that will attract money. That's why I use those, who clearly don't demand money: perchance, Herehaven, ST"
"They are rarely a polished, professional product."
"No emotions behind the character like it used to have."
Simultaneously the most-used, most-quit, and worst-rated platform.
No other platform is simultaneously first in all three columns. Most of the people still on C.AI describe it as the worst thing they have used. They stay because leaving costs them more than staying does.
"c.ai because i dont have any choice left"
"I forget. I just remember finding C.AI and treating it like a chew toy until the service degraded too much for me to enjoy it."
"Stopped C.AI because it collapsed on itself."
One longtime C.AI user gave us the most detailed answer in the survey β a date-stamped account of exactly when and how the platform lost them. To be clear: this is one respondent's telling, not a verified timeline. But it's worth walking through, because it captures what the collapse felt like from inside better than any statistic.
"The character.ai I know for three years was peak until this year 2026 on May 8th, everything went downhill."
"They keep making new features that nobody asked for or is unnecessary... that's how the app went downhill."
"I found it really sad how character.ai is now ever since the new ceo in the character.ai company came."
Every C.AI complaint above is about the product. The one that actually ended accounts wasn't. 17% of everyone who named a platform they quit named age verification as the reason β the same share that named the model downgrade. In 2023, content filters drove the exodus. In 2026, a camera does.
And this one reaches well past C.AI. It is law, it is global, and it is coming for every platform in this survey.
Age verification is the defining platform issue of 2026. Compliance is legally mandatory, and the rollout is a mess.
What started as C.AI's problem is now an industry-wide regulatory wave. Governments worldwide are mandating identity verification for platforms with user-generated content. The laws are real, the fines are massive, and there are no industry standards for how to comply. Every platform is improvising.
Here's what Janitor AI is navigating right now β a platform that publicly stated they are against KYC for social media but has no choice. Verification is triggered strictly by IP address:
There are no industry standards, no unified requirements, and no consistent definitions between jurisdictions. A platform serving a global audience is complying with a different law β with different penalties and different technical demands β in every region. Every platform is improvising through a minefield.
Compliance means outsourcing verification to identity vendors β and the vendors keep proving the users' fears right.
October 2025: 5CA, an EU-based third-party service provider for Discord, was hacked. Roughly 70,000 users' government IDs β submitted for age appeals β leaked. The IDs people were assured would be handled safely ended up in a breach.
February 2026: Researchers discovered that Persona β the verification vendor used by C.AI, Discord, and Reddit β had left its government dashboard codebase (2,456 files) exposed on a public server. What the code revealed about a "simple age check":
This is the landscape users are being told to trust with their faces. Even Janitor's chosen vendor, k-ID β picked specifically for its privacy-first design, deleting documents after verification and passing back only a yes/no β exists inside an ecosystem where the last two vendors to make headlines made them for breaches and exposed code.
"I'm not giving anyone my face just to shoot alpha mafia ceo daddy"
"I would rather have no account than have my information illegally stolen."
"character.ai blatantly violates user privacy with age verification... I deleted my account in its entirety."
"I've quit Character.AI when they started rolling out the age verification thing. That really grinds my gears."
"Age verification is being rolled out worldwide, and we're constantly shifting toward alternatives."
40+ platforms named. But half the community uses exactly one.
A fragmented market made of monogamous users. Nobody has consolidated this β and almost nobody is shopping around either.
SCROLL TO EXPLORE β
A solo-dev platform that earned genuine, unprompted community advocacy. What stands out is how consistent the reasons are: an attentive developer, generous free memory, and steady updates. Nobody praised a feature list.
"The dev that built it tries very hard to make something for everyone that is a fun, safe place to create immersive stories."
"steady good development, the memory is even for free tier users nearly infinite"
Platforms quit this year, and why. The operators come up far more often than the technology does.
"All platforms. Context memory small. Response time slow. Developer engagement sucks."
"Polybuzz, tried to go back to it but the very thing that drove me to use them (the no filter) was gone"
"I stopped using Backyard AI because they stopped supporting the local PC client"
"None of them can compare to c.ai in its peak and they all cost money or need verification."
New for 2026: the most-requested feature is a time machine.
Asked what would make them recommend a platform, respondents didn't describe a better product. They described an older one. "Similar to old c.ai." "App like old chai." "Bring the old chat models back." These are answers to a forward-looking question, and they point backwards.
It shows up everywhere: in what people quit over, in what they'd pay for, in what they name as their most memorable conversation ever. The peak experience for this community's heaviest users is dated, and most of them date it to 2023. That reads as a product regression complaint with three years of evidence behind it.
Go on. Try the top one.
"None of them can compare to c.ai in its peak β and they all cost money or need verification."
Users attempting to have unrestricted creative roleplays end up being pushed out to poorly moderated gooner slop platforms.
The survey traces a clear path. People leave heavily filtered platforms because the filters interrupt their stories. They land on platforms with very permissive moderation. Then they're unhappy there too, because those platforms feel dominated by pornography and low-quality writing.
"Character ai. Tiptoeing around the filters was the worst."
"restrictions on private chats, lack of ability to have private NSFW chats, filters"
"Any platform where you're immediately bombarded with porn"
"Aesthetics, features, cost, if it's a gooner site or not."
"Talkie or polybuzz because they both had very poor quality writing and couldn't roleplay a non-sexual story without trying to force sex into it"
"Crushon.ai ... normal users have nearly nothing, the tiers are WAY TO EXPENSIVE and its full on focus on NFSW is just... stupid."
"Personally, I feel there is a far-too strong fixation on NSFW, sexual content. I hate filters myself, but I never used these kinds of platforms for that specific content... Rather, I sometimes engage in roleplays that include very violent scenes, which a filter may get in the way of for being too graphic."
Users seeking unrestricted roleplay feel forced to choose between restrictive platforms and poorly curated NSFW-first ones. The survey suggests many of them don't want "anything goes" moderation at all. They want unrestricted storytelling in their own chats, alongside discovery pages they can browse without wading through explicit content.
"Good variety, non slop. Selective between SFW or NSFW characters."
"It doesn't have to be gooner activity to make AI roleplay fun."
"I'm an adult that wants Game of Thrones style content."
% who put each in their top 3 features.
Everything above cleared 10%. Everything that didn't: image generation, video generation, voice/audio, speed, message deletion, lorebooks β and, revealingly, "privacy policy," which almost nobody picks as a top-3 feature but which shows up constantly as a reason people quit.
"Robust character creator, adherence to character, good memory, decent writing, good editing options"
New for 2026: users can now name specific LLM writing tics. Purple prose. Essay-length replies. The "it was not x, but y" formula. Responses that read like ChatGPT instead of a character. This complaint barely existed a year ago. The first platform to ship anti-slop tuning has a real differentiator.
"Responses too long and a lot of filling with poetry, like 'it was not x, but y'... also feels like chatgpt and not creative at all"
"The messages are really stale and more like an essay, not a story."
"If the replies actually contain dialogue and not an essay."
What makes a character feel real? Good fiction. Natural dialogue, detailed actions, emotional reactions, plot progression, character flaws, a voice that stays consistent. The standard is believability inside the fictional world, held consistently from one message to the next.
"A conversation when they surprise me in a good way, by coming up with something nuanced and in character that I wasn't anticipating but that makes total sense."
"Memory and consistency of RP, quality of replies, when we talk about difficult psychological storylines, redemption arcs and so on"
The industry is building for investors. Users just want chat.
54% of everyone who answered named image, video, or voice features as things they'd never use. Users read these as money diverted away from core chat β and in C.AI's case, they believe the bloat directly killed the text models they loved.
"I'm more a writer than a content creator."
"I hate chat style interactions. Bells and stickers and achievements are also frowned upon. Focus on the core roleplay experience."
"Video generation or heavy reliance on image generation. It just seems to raise the price of the subscription tier and I don't really care for it or need it."
"text to speech β always poor quality, breaks immersion, all characters talk the same and their voices don't reflect the character's personality"
"any irrelevant bloat that isn't truly needed"
"I dont care about image gens. Instead of those, platforms can put better models for better rp quality."
Users are now quitting over what platforms do with their data, not just what the AI says. This was barely a theme in 2025. "Privacy" now shows up as a standalone answer to what makes a platform worth paying for.
And the trust problem runs deeper than the big platforms. The subreddit regularly sees a pattern: a dev pops up with a vibecoded site and a copy-pasted privacy policy, collects users, and disappears within weeks. One developer openly admitted to a journalist that they were reading users' chats β while their privacy policy said they didn't. When the privacy policy is fiction and the dev might be gone by next month, users have no reliable way to know who to trust with their most personal writing.
"Lack of respect for privacy of users"
"Loremate, due to censorship and lack of privacy in 'private' chats"
This community are creators. The tools to move their work exist β just not on the platforms holding it.
Four in five respondents build characters, and the standard for moving them has existed for years: portable character cards, importable across SillyTavern, Chub, Janitor and plenty of others. This is a solved problem. It's just not solved where most of this community actually is. Two separate failures showed up in this year's answers, and neither existed as a theme a year ago.
The big platforms keep character definitions hidden and offer no export. If your library lives there, migration means rebuilding by hand from whatever you can still see, or from memory. One user spent years accumulating work, then had to weigh it against the effort of moving it.
"I want to move all my previous bots to a new site.. and started looking for better C.AI alternatives."
"the fact that dealing with all the C.AI has put me through for at least 8 years... I'm willing to move after 8 long years."
β C.AI launched in 2022, so eight years isn't literally possible. We're keeping the quote anyway: the exaggeration is the point. It feels like eight years.
Here's the trap. Hiding the definition is the only protection platforms offer β and creators can hide theirs too. But it doesn't protect anything. The greeting is public. The bio is public. The personality surfaces quickly in chat, and anyone can guess the rest close enough to pass. A determined copier reconstructs a bot from its visible surface in a few messages.
So the lock only ever catches one person: the author. One respondent watched a bot they'd built get lifted wholesale, down to their own spelling mistakes, and had to escalate to the site owner personally to get anyone to look.
"They have wonderful bots, but their staff team is shit and refuse to believe evidence of ai bot theft even with proof.. I had to message the owner directly."
"I have always used c.ai because the quality and choices were better than other apps β but I'm looking to move to a site that restricts me less."
Why most of this community pays nothing at all.
Roughly a quarter pay anything at all, and the never-pay wall grew taller this year: 28% said they would never pay in last year's survey, against 59% now. The write-in answers make the objection far more specific than "paying is bad." Subscriptions themselves draw almost no complaint. What draws complaint is memory sitting behind one: charging for the capability that makes the product work at all reads to users as extortion.
"A memory pay wall." β the complete answer to "what's the single biggest problem with AI chat platforms right now?"
"those without it, but are also alone and cant pay for better memory, has a unfairness."
"Having one very important or many important things/features behind a paywall/subscription"
"If something is free, you are the product."
"Promise of not rugpulling users."
"Not too expensive (max 15$ for full access), good devs with an open mind, and a VERY GOOD memory and character customization."
"Attentive to users devs, quality of replies, not obviously money oriented. I pay for such platforms, I just don't want them to push subscriptions down my throat."
"If it's an accessible price β literally less than 10 bucks since I'm jobless and my currency sucks"
Influencers are dead. Developers matter more than anyone expects.
The handful who do follow someone can't agree on a single name β every answer was a different person, and none of them were named twice. There is no shared canon here, no channel a platform can buy its way onto. Search and a subreddit are doing the entire job of discovery in a category that grew up on TikTok.
Across recommendation, retention, and open feedback questions, respondents brought up developers unprompted. Model quality gets people in the door. Developer trust decides whether they recommend you six months later.
"A good dev"
β a complete, standalone answer to "what would make you recommend a platform"
"Cool Devs of the platform, steady develop-progress, no expensive tiers to unlock with paid-only locked features"
"Developer engagement and community."
"good contact to the devs"
What users can't bear to leave behind.
Users build worlds inside these platforms. Long-running stories, character relationships, emotional arcs that develop over weeks or months. Migrating means shattering the snowglobe β losing chats that are precious and irreplaceable. The real lock-in is a story at a key point that you can't bring with you.
This is the number that explains the whole survey. Forty-plus platforms were named β and half this community still uses exactly one. They aren't loyal and they aren't happy; a majority just told us the market got worse. They're stuck. The snowglobe is the moat.
"My stories are at key points, and I don't want to start over just yet."
"Being hooked into a story without ads or a bot trying to derail my stories."
"Claude always feels too nice, and I like to write with villains. All scrapped for HereHaven, where I currently reside."
"because after using c.ai so much it has become an addiction, a way to talk to someone. but after so much shit with the filter.. i cant even story board anymore without the filter going 'how about no?'"
Last year, self-hosting looked like a wave about to break. It didn't. Interest went down this year, and "not interested" is now an outright majority. Local remains a committed minority with a high tolerance for setup.
The reason is in the write-ins, and it comes down to UX. People who tried it quit over the setup tax β the time spent configuring instead of writing. Every rug-pull recruits for local in theory. In practice, the onboarding loses them.
"sillytavern β because i spent more time learning how it works and setting it up than actually roleplaying... too expensive too"
"SillyTavern offers some quality-of-life features and customization features that, I feel, are better than janitor β but it's a bit confusing in regards to the ui. I've been using it since 2023 and i still get occasionally lost in the menus."
"The ability to use third-party LLMs, mostly."
"If r/characterairunaways disappeared tomorrow, how would you feel?"
"Somewhat disappointed" is the largest single answer, and it's the honest one. People value this place for platform scouting β but they're not sentimental about it. That's a healthy relationship with a subreddit, and it sets a clear bar: keep being useful or become forgettable.
"It gives me a great place to see what's happening on different platforms or if there are any new cool sites to try out."
"I have seen recommendations for ai sites and apps I have never seen elsewhere"
"Yes, let's me know I'm not the only one suffering"
"It's all ads, not a good discussion place."
β the self-critique we're taking seriously
"getting to remove the obvious spambots and scammers because i'm a moderator LMAO it's cathartic"
Asked for the worst platform they'd ever tried, one respondent didn't argue. They just quoted a character card they'd found there, verbatim, and rested their case.
"this is jessie from pokemon but she changed her look and hair style she not a part of team rocket because they spit up for good afther 25 years of working together but now she on her own catching pokemon and she a futa to cause she wanted to change so yeah but there on pokemon she really wants pokemon thats a mythical call meru:meru a female pokemon with a girl body and girl parts but she a pokemon and she can do what ever a pokemon and human do (and this is my jessie dont judge me)"
β submitted as evidence, and honestly it holds up
The questions that come up in the sub every week, answered with this year's data.
Named by respondents as platforms they use, quit, recommend, or regret. Inclusion is not endorsement β several appear in more than one of those categories.