Janitor AI — free AI companion roleplay

Launched in June 2023 by developer Jan Zoltkowski, Janitor AI ran for a long stretch on changelog posts and the occasional Reddit reply rather than press interviews. Three years later, third-party analytics estimates put it north of 100 million visits a month in 2026 — the traffic band of a mid-sized news network. The exact figure swings month to month depending on which tracker you read.

Here's how it works. Someone in the community writes a character — name, backstory, a couple of opening lines — and uploads it. The library now holds well over a million of them, organised by tag rather than by algorithm: anime archetypes, historical figures, sci-fi captains, dating-sim tropes, D&D NPCs, whatever the community felt like making that week. You scroll, pick whoever catches your eye, and the chat opens. If nothing in the library fits, the builder takes maybe two minutes to sketch your own from scratch.

Model choice is what most first-timers overlook. Janitor doesn't lock you into one LLM. The default is JanitorLLM — the platform's own model, free, no key required, bumped to v2 in January 2026 with a fatter context window. Want stronger writing? Paste an OpenAI, Claude, DeepSeek, or Kobold Horde key into settings and the same conversation runs through whichever brain you picked. GPT-4o will cost a cent or two per turn. Claude Haiku sits around a fifth of that. DeepSeek is close to free.

For years this was browser-only. That changed in February 2026, when official iOS and Android apps landed (publisher "JanitorAI, INC"). One catch worth knowing: the apps open in a restricted Safe Mode to satisfy the app stores, and NSFW only unlocks through a toggle on the website — not inside the app. Copycat apps are everywhere, so install from the link on janitorai.com. Sign-in is email, Google, or Discord and takes ten seconds; public characters are browsable without an account.

Everything in the library is community-uploaded. No first-party characters, no editorial curation — just tags, ratings, and view counts. Popular ones climb the grid; forgotten ones stay findable through tag search.

Tags are the actual navigation layer. You can filter by genre (fantasy, sci-fi, modern), tone (fluff, dark, humor), or character attribute (femboy, monster, celebrity). Layer tags together to narrow fast. That's how "shy vampire librarian" becomes findable in three clicks.

Character cards vary in quality wildly. A well-built one comes with a 3,200-token personality prompt, a scenario setup, an example dialogue block, and a written greeting message. A lazy one has three lines of description and a picture. Sort by rating, not by newest, when you're new to the library.

Anyone can build a character, upload it, and see it appear in the public grid within seconds. On active days that's several hundred new cards; on quiet days, a few dozen. The builder is the same tool the community uses.

Seven builder fields actually matter. Name and avatar are the obvious ones. Personality is the big one — up to 3,200 tokens of free-form character description, which in practice means about 2,400 words if you want to fill it. Most public characters use 400–800.

Scenario sets the opening context: where you and the character are, what's happening, why you're both in the same room. Greeting is the character's first message in the chat — the thing you'll read before you type anything. A strong greeting sets tone and decides whether you stick with a character or bounce.

Tags feed the discovery grid, so choose them honestly. Example dialogue teaches the model how the character speaks: three or four sample exchanges will lift the writing quality more than another paragraph of personality description.

Two smaller notes. Everything is editable after publishing — a live character can be tuned mid-session. And characters can be private to your account, so nothing forces you to upload publicly.

Response length is the first thing worth controlling. If you want shorter replies, ask for them plainly in-scene — "reply in a couple of sentences" works, and the model actually holds it for a while. This is one of the top r/JanitorAI beginner questions and there's no hidden setting for it.

Model choice matters more than prompt tricks. If JanitorLLM keeps drifting, switching to Claude Haiku or DeepSeek Reasoner will fix more problems than any amount of prompt engineering. Both are cheap through BYOK. DeepSeek is the current best price-to-quality on Janitor per the community's own testing.

Formatting inside chats is straightforward: *asterisks* for actions, plain text for spoken dialogue, quotation marks optional. Some characters expect one style over the other in their example dialogue, so match theirs.

If a chat gets stuck, the fastest reset is regenerating the last reply (button on the message). Second-fastest is an out-of-character note in brackets: [continue in a serious tone] — the model treats brackets as author direction.