u/meshari4413

I (18M from KSA) got hooked on Character.AI when it first launched back in September 2022. I genuinely loved it—both the app and the web version. Because I had a lot of free time back then, I spent hours every single day chatting with bots of all the characters I liked.Fast forward to late 2024. I started using Chai for NSFW chats that I couldn't have on Character.AI because of the filter, and I quickly got hooked on that too. However, around mid to late 2025, Character.AI started to change. They began "experimenting" with the chat models by removing some and adding others. This caused the bot quality to drop over time, which sparked a lot of controversy in the community. While that was still somewhat bearable, they eventually added ads to the app, which everyone hated.When users complained, the developers responded by saying they needed the ad revenue to buy more GPUs and maintain the servers. They wanted to avoid shutting down temporarily or putting everyone on a slow mode during high-load durations. They did provide a way to counter this using "charms"—where you get about 5 daily and can pay 20 of them for an ad-free hour—but it wasn't a great solution.On the other side, Chai was still treating its users really well despite being older, having a smaller team, and a lower budget. They had no filter and offered unlimited messages in exchange for ads that actually weren't that annoying. Ads were their main profit alongside the Premium and Ultra subscriptions, which honestly offered some amazing benefits.Unfortunately, by the end of last year, Chai started breaking down too. Waiting rooms started appearing because of high server loads, followed by region locks on areas they saw as non-profitable. A few weeks later, some users lost access to unlimited messages and went back to the old 100-message daily limit. This restriction soon spread to all users. A month or so later, they removed the advanced character creation option, which is basically the mind and description of the bot. Without it, all you can do is add a name and a profile picture, leaving the bots as empty shells of their former glory that only make cheesy improvisation attempts.To make matters worse, both platforms kept raising their subscription prices. That was the breaking point for me. After a while of thinking, I decided to delete both accounts and abandon the platforms. I spent the next whole week searching for any good alternatives, but there was nothing out there.The moral of the story is that their greed made them dig their own graves. Additionally, any Reddit post in those communities that criticizes the current situation, even slightly, gets removed and the OP gets banned. That censorship was the final straw where I accepted reality and was forced out of my addiction.

I (18M from KSA) got hooked on Character.AI when it first launched back in September 2022. I genuinely loved it—both the app and the web version. Because I had a lot of free time back then, I spent hours every single day chatting with bots of all the characters I liked.Fast forward to late 2024. I started using Chai for NSFW chats that I couldn't have on Character.AI because of the filter, and I quickly got hooked on that too. However, around mid to late 2025, Character.AI started to change. They began "experimenting" with the chat models by removing some and adding others. This caused the bot quality to drop over time, which sparked a lot of controversy in the community. While that was still somewhat bearable, they eventually added ads to the app, which everyone hated.When users complained, the developers responded by saying they needed the ad revenue to buy more GPUs and maintain the servers. They wanted to avoid shutting down temporarily or putting everyone on a slow mode during high-load durations. They did provide a way to counter this using "charms"—where you get about 5 daily and can pay 20 of them for an ad-free hour—but it wasn't a great solution.On the other side, Chai was still treating its users really well despite being older, having a smaller team, and a lower budget. They had no filter and offered unlimited messages in exchange for ads that actually weren't that annoying. Ads were their main profit alongside the Premium and Ultra subscriptions, which honestly offered some amazing benefits.Unfortunately, by the end of last year, Chai started breaking down too. Waiting rooms started appearing because of high server loads, followed by region locks on areas they saw as non-profitable. A few weeks later, some users lost access to unlimited messages and went back to the old 100-message daily limit. This restriction soon spread to all users. A month or so later, they removed the advanced character creation option, which is basically the mind and description of the bot. Without it, all you can do is add a name and a profile picture, leaving the bots as empty shells of their former glory that only make cheesy improvisation attempts.To make matters worse, both platforms kept raising their subscription prices. That was the breaking point for me. After a while of thinking, I decided to delete both accounts and abandon the platforms. I spent the next whole week searching for any good alternatives, but there was nothing out there.The moral of the story is that their greed made them dig their own graves. Additionally, any Reddit post in those communities that criticizes the current situation, even slightly, gets removed and the OP gets banned. That censorship was the final straw where I accepted reality and was forced out of my addiction.