Free Tier Review - It's really bad!
I'll come right out and say it. All the free message tier models are atrociously bad right now. I'm very familiar with how AIRealm operates, have been subscribed off and on for over a year, and have created a few custom worlds.
I tend to rotate subscriptions here and there on things to save money since i'm hardly ever using all my available subscriptions at once. Lately I've been unsubbed for a little over a month and decided to test out a few things while I had the opportunity. I've tried all the available models with free messages and they all really, really, suck. Is the best way I can phrase it.
The models hardly ever take the initiative and introduce plot lines, automatic updates to character information aren't triggered without some extreme prompting, preferences, guides, and npc cards aren't followed, the DM never asks the character to roll for anything outside of combat. Messages are either extremely short, or full of fluff detail to the point of nauseam. I can go on.
At least in the past we had a few stand out models here and there like Grok that did a serviceable job, and many community members have done a good bit of optimizing models like deepseek on the discord, but even those measures only last a few messages. After 10 or so messages, long before context gets summarized, the models loose any sense of direction they were provided.
I think this has a lot to do with the V2 update. The pretty UI is nice but I suspect it's eating up some resources since there are now a lot more sections for the models to parse through causing bloat.
It's my hope models become cheaper as competition continues and the technology improves, but as of right now we're in a pretty bad situation.
EDIT: I initially suspected this had something to do with the V2 update, particularly because the new NPC Cards, GM Guides, character data and other systems introduce considerably more contextual information. I don't know whether that's actually the cause, however, and it's entirely possible that the bigger issue is the changing roster and behavior of the underlying models.
EDIT2: I'm not claiming the owner intentionally degraded anything. I'm saying the free-tier experience has demonstrably become substantially worse than it was when I started using the service, and the fact that this affects every currently available free model makes me suspicious that something upstream of the individual models changed. Where once there were relatively powerful, and even impressive at times, models available they have since been degraded in one way or another into what I would describe as a poor experience.
We, friends and I, willingly subscribed easily after noticing what the site could accomplish, and had a blast with no second thoughts at all to our decision, but now it's clearly taken a turn. I don't know if that is due to monetary concerns or literal under the hood changes, but it's even more clear recently after looking through bug reports and the overall state of things that the quality of these models has taken a nose dive.