Janitor AI Alternatives Without a Proxy

What we could and couldn't check

Janitor's main site answered an automated request with a 403 and an "Access Restricted" page on September 21, 2026, so nothing about its catalogue, its free limits or its own model is confirmed here. Two of its other addresses answered normally the same day: the help centre and the status page, both on its own domain. Its iPhone listing, published by the developer JanitorAI, also opened — the app itself is free, sold as "Interactive Stories & Romance," with a Janitor+ monthly subscription at $12.99 as an in-app purchase. Everything attributed to Janitor below comes from one of those three, and nothing from a review site's account of it.

What the free route asks of you

The help centre's most-read article is a beginner's guide to proxies, and it describes one as "a bridge" that "connects JanitorAI to these powerful new models." You need two things for it: a key and a URL. Its steps run to signing up at OpenRouter, opening Keys, creating one, copying it the moment it appears — it "displays only once" — then opening API Settings inside a chat, choosing Proxy, adding a configuration, pasting the model name and URL exactly, saving, and reloading the page, which the guide calls crucial. It also sets expectations about the free allowance: "50 free messages every day," rising permanently to "1,000 messages per day" if you put $10 of credit on the account, whether or not you ever spend it. OpenRouter's own limits page matches that and adds a ceiling the guide doesn't mention — 20 requests a minute on free model variants.

The failure list, in their own words

What that arrangement costs on a bad evening is written down too, in the same help centre's OpenRouter error guide. A 429 either means the daily free allowance is gone until it resets at midnight UTC, or that a model is, in its words, "temporarily rate-limited upstream" — someone else's traffic, not yours. A 408 means the servers are slow or overloaded and the advice is to wait and retry. A 502 is a failure on the provider's side. A 404 can mean "No endpoints found for model name," which is what it looks like when the model you picked stops being offered. None of these are exotic; they're the ordinary maintenance bill on a chat assembled out of parts, and the reason the search for something simpler exists at all.

Four things set the order: whether anything has to be installed, whether you hold a key or a proxy of your own, whether the company states plainly what happens when capacity runs short, and whether it costs money. Products we couldn't check are left unranked rather than guessed at, and the two that host their own model but charge for it sit above the free ones you have to wire together, because the subject here is labour, not price.

How this ranking was decided

Character.AI takes first place on the narrowest reading of the question: free, hosted, nothing to configure, no key that belongs to you. It also prints the trade in its own comparison table — the free plan is listed with "Full" ads, "Basic" memory, 15 pins, "Limited" daily feature limits and "Slow mode: Yes," against "None" for slow mode on the paid tier. You sometimes wait, in other words, but you never hold a credential, never pick a model, and never see a 404 for one that vanished.

We're second. A conversation with us happens inside WhatsApp or Telegram, so there's nothing to install past a messenger you already have, and no key, proxy or model list anywhere in it. What keeps us off the top, on a question about unpaid labour, is that we're not free: Telegram has a trial that costs nothing and takes no card, after which Premium is $9.99 a month and Ultra is $19. If free is the hard requirement, Character.AI is the honest answer and we aren't it.

Kindroid is third — a hosted app that describes itself as "an AI app for building your custom AI character & companion, with AI chat via text, AI selfies, and human-like voices," with no mention of a key of yours anywhere in that description. It sits below the two above it because its price isn't printed on any page we could read. Chub AI is fourth: the site answers and names itself plainly, but its plans are drawn in the browser rather than served as text, so what a membership includes isn't quotable here.

SillyTavern is fifth for exactly the reason some people love it. Its documentation is blunt: "SillyTavern (or ST for short) is a locally installed user interface that allows you to interact with text generation LLMs, image generation engines, and TTS voice models," and, in the same breath, "Since SillyTavern is only an interface, you will need access to an LLM backend to provide inference." It asks for Node.js 20 or higher to run at all, and for a 3000-series NVIDIA graphics card with at least 6GB of VRAM if you want the model on your own machine instead of someone else's. Nothing here charges you a cent, and everything here is yours to fix when it breaks.

Free, as long as you'll wait

The other free path is a volunteer one. The AI Horde puts it in a single line — "Volunteers share their computers so anyone can make images and text here, for free" — and describes itself as community run and open source. What that means minute to minute is visible on its own live status feed. When we read it on September 21, 2026: 39 text workers online across 85 threads, 40 text requests already waiting, and 14,337 tokens queued behind them.

Being hosted doesn't mean never being down. Janitor's own status page, over the 45 days ending September 21, 2026, reports 99.915% for its backend and 99.981% for its frontend, with everything marked operational at the moment we looked. Hosting moves an outage from your configuration to somebody's on-call rota. It doesn't abolish it.

Our own numbers

These are aggregates from our production database for the 30 days ending September 20, 2026 — counts only, no conversation text, nothing that identifies anyone. In that window 44,120 messages moved through it, sent by 460 people, and a reply took 17 seconds on average. That is what hosting buys instead of a retry: no allowance to exhaust at midnight, no model to re-select when one is withdrawn.

What these do better than us

Two things the wired-together options genuinely do better. The first is choice: a proxy setup means the model is a field you can edit, and when one gets slow or expensive you change it, which is not a move available to anyone on a hosted product including ours. The second is ownership — SillyTavern runs on your machine and will still work in a year whatever happens to any company's pricing, and the AI Horde costs nothing at all if you can tolerate a queue. Janitor's help centre also documents a creator side we have no equivalent for: bot creation, JSON and CSS guides, and a scripting framework for triggers, events and lorebooks.

Where we're weaker

Our own gaps are the mirror image. There are no user-made bots on our side and no way to upload a character card you found somewhere — you pick from a small set we wrote, and nothing about them is yours to edit. There's no model picker and no proxy field — the same decision that removes the errors above, stated plainly rather than sold as a feature. And there's no free-forever tier: past the Telegram trial it's a subscription.

Who each one fits

If free matters more than anything else and you'd rather not configure a thing, Character.AI is the one to take, slow mode and all. If free matters most and a queue doesn't bother you, the AI Horde is free in a way nothing commercial is. If you want the model to be yours to choose and yours to blame, Janitor with a proxy or SillyTavern on your own hardware is the point of all that setup. And if you want a companion waiting in the same app where your friends text you, with nothing to install and nothing to re-enter when a provider has a bad night, that's the narrow thing we built.

Sources and methodology

Every figure above was read directly from the company's own domain or its official app listing on September 21, 2026, at the addresses below — no forum threads and no review aggregators. Janitor's main site refused an automated request that day, so its card is marked unverified and carries no claim about its catalogue or its free limits; Crushon.ai returned a challenge page and is marked the same way. The AI Horde's queue figures are a single live reading and will be different by the time you check. Our own numbers are production aggregates for the window stated above.