Uncensored AI Chat Apps: Hosted or Local

Underneath both sits the same question: who ends up holding the transcript. A hosted service keeps messages on its servers, because that's where the model runs. A model on your own drive keeps them where you put them. What follows is what each product states on its own public pages, read on September 20, 2026 — no accounts were created, and nobody poked at a filter by hand.

Camp one: the weights land on your own drive

Ollama is the plainest version of running a model yourself. Its homepage describes letting you "use open models with your coding agents so you can spend less while keeping your data private," calls what it distributes "Open weights and open source," and states that "Local models are always free." A Pro plan at $20/month "Includes $60 of usage" for models Ollama hosts, so the free part is specifically the part running on your hardware. Downloads exist for macOS, Linux and Windows, and the library carries llama3.1, deepseek-r1 and a long list behind them. What it doesn't ship is a character — that part is a prompt you write.

LM Studio is the desktop version of the same idea, and the one that publishes real hardware numbers: macOS 14.0 or newer on Apple Silicon, with Intel Macs not supported; on Windows, "AVX2 instruction set support is required" and "at least 4GB of dedicated VRAM is recommended"; on Linux, Ubuntu 20.04 or newer through an AppImage. Sixteen gigabytes of RAM is the recommendation everywhere. Its download page lists the price as 0. Its agent, Bionic, is "natively local," and the site says voice and audio data "is processed locally and never leaves your device."

SillyTavern is what people usually mean by setting something up themselves. Its documentation calls it "a locally installed user interface that allows you to interact with text generation LLMs, image generation engines, and TTS voice models," then names the catch: "Since SillyTavern is only an interface, you will need access to an LLM backend to provide inference." It runs anywhere Node.js 20 or higher does — Windows, Linux, Mac, Android through Termux, Docker — under the AGPL-3.0 license. Two decisions, then: the interface, and whatever engine answers behind it.

The middle: open models, someone else's hardware

Venice.ai sits between the camps and is direct about it, offering "Uncensored AI chat, images, video, and more" on "powerful open-source language models" — open weights without owning a GPU. Its pricing page lists Free at $0, Pro at $18/month, Pro Plus at $68 and Max at $200, with the free plan described as base models, 10 text prompts per day and 15 image prompts. The privacy wording is unusually specific for a hosted product: "Local-only conversation storage," "Zero data retention (Private mode)," and on a higher tier, "Client-side encryption. Your prompts are encrypted before leaving your device."

FreedomGPT is a different animal from what the name suggests. Its site describes something that "automatically gives you the best answer from ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and hundreds of other AIs," putting "uncensored AI, open source AI models, and censored proprietary AI models" side by side rather than picking one. Windows and Mac downloads sit alongside a browser version. Its pricing URL returned a 404 when we looked, and no amount appears on the pages that did load.

Camp two: the character is already written

Candy AI and Nomi are the finished-product end. Candy AI calls itself "the best AI girlfriend app, letting you create personalized virtual companions or connect instantly with our realistic AI characters," opens with a free trial, sells monthly, quarterly and yearly plans without printing the amounts, and takes Visa, MasterCard and crypto including BTC, ETH, USDC and Litecoin; it runs in a browser or installs as a progressive web app. For anyone reading uncensored as no rules at all, that same page says interactions "are fictional, consenting, and must comply with our Community Guidelines." Nomi — "An AI Companion with Memory and a Soul" — ships on iOS, Android and a web beta, is free to start with no credit card, and keeps its amounts off the homepage too. Janitor AI's site refused our request that day, so nothing about it is confirmed here.

The practical gap between the camps shows up in the system prompt. Locally it's a text file you own: a character card you edit, an instruction you rewrite when the tone drifts, sampling settings you turn down when replies start repeating. In a hosted product that file exists too, but the vendor wrote it and you never see it. Neither is wrong — one is a kit, the other is a product — and most people who bounce off one of them wanted the other.

Where we sit, and the numbers behind it

TooShy is squarely in the hosted camp. Our characters have no adult-content filter, and conversation happens inside WhatsApp or Telegram, so there's nothing to install, no extra app on a home screen and no hardware question at all — the phone in your hand is the requirement.

In the 30 days to September 20, 2026, 44,120 messages moved through TooShy across 460 people. An active conversation ran 64 messages on average; the longest reached 899. A character answers in about 17 seconds, and 1.1% of messages weren't text. Those are production aggregates over that one window, counted rather than sampled, and nothing in them identifies anyone.

Premium is $9.99/month and Ultra is $19/month, with a free trial in Telegram for anyone who wants to see how a character writes before paying. We don't publish a total registered-user count, so there isn't one here.

What running it yourself gets you that we can't

The clearest thing the local camp does better isn't close: on your own machine, the answer to who can read this is you. LM Studio's line about audio never leaving the device is exactly the promise we can't make — our model doesn't run on your phone, it runs on our servers, and the messages sit there. Ollama's "Local models are always free" carries a second meaning as well: nobody can change the terms on a file you already downloaded.

The second is control over the machinery. SillyTavern hands you the instruction, the backend and the sampling settings, and lets you swap the entire engine when an answer disappoints; our characters are fixed and can't be opened up. Venice publishes commitments we don't match — local-only conversation storage, client-side encryption on a paid tier — while still being a hosted service, which shows that hosted doesn't have to mean opaque.

Our honest limits, and who each camp suits

The honest version of us: we're a managed service. We hold the logs, we picked the model, we wrote the characters, and they are a fixed cast rather than a library you extend yourself. Messages also travel through WhatsApp and Telegram, so those companies carry them too — convenient, and one more party in the path. If the point of the search was that nobody but you ever sees the conversation, we're not the answer to it.

Anyone who wants control of the weights, the instruction and the logs, and doesn't mind an install, 16 GB of RAM and some configuration, starts with LM Studio or Ollama, and adds SillyTavern once the interface itself begins to matter. Anyone who wants open models without buying a GPU can try Venice's free daily allowance first. Anyone who wants a character answering without a filter, on a phone, tonight, wants the hosted camp — ours, Candy AI's or Nomi's, depending mostly on whether you'd rather stay inside a messenger you already use.

Where these facts came from

Every quote above comes from a public page read on September 20, 2026, with the URLs listed below; we created no accounts, and where an amount sits behind a signup we've said so rather than estimating it. Our own figures come from a read-only query against TooShy's production database over the 30 days ending that day, aggregated so that no individual conversation appears in them.