Janitor AI alternatives: private character chat with no proxy to set up

The Morse teamPublished October 19, 2026Facts checked October 19, 20269 min read

The best Janitor AI alternatives for people who don't want to set up a proxy are Morse, Character.AI, and, if you're comfortable running software yourself, SillyTavern. As of October 19, 2026, Janitor AI gives you its own free model with no setup, but its stronger models mean either a paid janitor+ subscription with per-token Router credits or an API key from another company pasted into Janitor's settings, which sends your chats to that company too.

We read Janitor AI's privacy policy, terms of service, safety page, community guidelines, and its help center guides to JLLM, proxies, Router, and janitor+ on October 19, 2026, then each alternative's own pages the same day. Janitor earns credit up front. It says plainly that it's for adults only, publishes its moderation numbers, puts account deletion in its settings, and promises it will "never sell your personal data or share private conversations with third parties for advertising or commercial purposes" (Janitor AI).

Janitor AI alternatives compared: setup, storage, and who reads your chats

As of October 19, 2026. Every Janitor fact links to Janitor's own page, and every other fact to that app's.

What does Janitor AI make you set up?

Nothing, if you stay on JLLM. Janitor describes JLLM as "the default model used in Janitor unless you've hooked up an external one via API" (Janitor). The free tier gives "unlimited chats with millions of bots" with a "context limit of around 9k tokens," and janitor+ adds "5x more context for better memory" and priority replies (Janitor). The help pages we read don't give the janitor+ price; it's shown at checkout.

For anything beyond JLLM, there are two routes.

Your own API key, through a proxy

Janitor's quickstart walks through it: make a free OpenRouter account, create a key under Keys, then in a Janitor chat open the gear icon, API Settings, and Add Configuration. You paste a proxy URL (https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions), a model name (the guide uses deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3-0324:free), and your key, which the guide says to treat "like a password." Free use is capped at "50 free messages/day," and adding $10 once raises it to 1,000 a day (Janitor).

Janitor's terms, updated October 8, 2026, allow this: configuring an API proxy in your settings doesn't count as an "unofficial client," which can get an account deleted (Janitor).

janitor+ Router

Router lets subscribers use outside models without their own key. It's "currently web only and available only to janitor+ subscribers," and "billed per token, at the rates displayed for each model," with $5 in launch credits that expire a year after you claim them (Janitor). The terms say Router credits are "final and non-refundable," and that a request can use credits even when the output is "filtered, moderated, or refused after processing begins" (Janitor).

Who sees your chats when you use a Janitor AI proxy?

Three companies instead of one. With a proxy, each message leaves Janitor for the proxy service, which passes it to the company that runs the model. Janitor's quickstart doesn't mention privacy at all (Janitor). Janitor's privacy policy, updated September 17, 2026, doesn't name any model provider either (Janitor).

The proxy in Janitor's own guide sets its own rules. OpenRouter says it "does not store your prompts or responses, unless you opt in," but it does keep metadata such as token counts and latency for each request (OpenRouter). It also says "each AI provider on OpenRouter has its own data handling policies," with separate training settings for paid and free models (OpenRouter). So whether the free DeepSeek route trains on your roleplay depends on settings in an OpenRouter account that Janitor's guide never mentions.

What does Janitor AI store about you?

More than some reviews say. One that ranks for "is Janitor AI safe," published May 27, 2026, says "Chat logs are not stored on their servers under the default setup" (ReviewMyTools). Janitor's own privacy policy lists "characters you create, chat conversations, messages, and other content" among what it collects, and defines your content to include "chat logs" (Janitor).

The same policy, as of October 19, 2026, says JanitorAI Inc.:

• collects your IP address, approximate location, device details, and "click patterns, search queries, and interaction data";
• uses cookies and pixels, including for "personalized experiences and content recommendations";
• uses data for "research and development to improve our AI systems";
• keeps personal data "only for as long as necessary," and after you delete your account, some records, including your email address, "may remain";
• may disclose information to comply with "legal processes, or governmental requests," and stores data in the United States and other countries (Janitor).

Its terms give Janitor "a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license" to what you submit, for "operating and improving the Platform" (Janitor). To delete your account, open Settings, then Security, then Delete Account; it's deactivated first, with a grace period to restore it (Janitor).

What are Janitor AI's age rules?

Janitor AI is for adults. Its terms say the platform is "intended solely for users who are at least 18 years of age" (Janitor), and its community guidelines say users it has "reasonable suspicion of being under 18 years of age are permanently banned" (Janitor). Users in Australia and Brazil must complete age verification through k-ID before they can use it (Janitor).

Janitor allows adult content between adult characters, and creators tag such characters "Limitless" (Janitor). Its iOS and Android apps keep NSFW content off by default to meet app store rules (Janitor). On moderation, Janitor says automated systems screen "every piece of content before it is published" and full-time moderators review reports "around the clock," with more than 20,000 human moderation actions a month (Janitor).

1. Morse: character chat with nothing to set up

With Janitor, your character chats sit with JanitorAI Inc., and with a proxy they also pass through two more companies you set up yourself. Morse is a web app built so your chats are kept on your device instead, with nothing to configure before the first message.

• No proxy, no API key. Characters, for roleplay and companion chats, is one of Morse's three surfaces, next to Chat and Studio. Over 30 models, open and closed, come with one account, so there's no OpenRouter key to create or model name to paste.
• Unlimited character messages on Free. The Free plan costs $0, needs no card, and puts no cap on character messages, alongside 15 messages a day in Chat and 3 images a day.
• Chats kept on your device, not ours. Your character chats, the characters you make, your personas, and your settings are stored in your browser, encrypted. Unlocking them takes two keys: one that never leaves your device, and one our server gives you when you sign in. Our servers don't keep your messages or log their content (privacy policy).
• No training, no selling, no ads. Morse doesn't train AI on your content, sell your data, or show ads, and runs no advertising trackers or third-party analytics.

Each chat in Morse's Chat runs in a privacy mode you pick. In Anonymous, our proxy removes your account, email, and IP address before GPT, Claude, or Gemini sees the message, so the provider answers without knowing it's you. In Private, open-weight models run on hosts that agreed to keep nothing. In E2EE, your browser checks a secure enclave's hardware proof and encrypts the message so only that enclave can read it. We explain the checks in end-to-end encrypted AI chat.

Morse is for adults only, and on paid plans an unfiltered model gives answers other apps refuse, including dark fiction. Pro is $19 a month and opens unfiltered models. Character chats show crisis lines when a message reads like suicidal thinking, checked on your device. Since your device holds the only copy, clearing your browser deletes your chats for good, and we can't recover them either, so keep anything you need.

2. Character.AI

Character.AI needs no setup either, and its sign-up page promises "10M+ Characters" (Character.AI). It runs on the web and in mobile apps. Its privacy policy, effective July 1, 2026, lists "chat communications" among what it collects and names "to train our artificial intelligence/machine learning models" and "tailored advertising" among its uses. It may disclose information to respond to "a warrant, subpoena, court order" (Character.AI).

Its terms bar anyone under 13, or under 16 in the EEA and UK (Character.AI), and on October 29, 2025 it announced it would end open-ended chat for users under 18 "no later than November 25" that year (Character.AI). Its subscription, c.ai+, is paid; the Character.AI pages we could read on October 19 didn't show the price. Our comparison of what AI apps do with your chats covers Character.AI's policy alongside the big chatbots.

3. SillyTavern

SillyTavern is the choice if you want full control and don't mind setup. It describes itself as "a locally installed user interface," free and open source under AGPL-3.0, that needs "NodeJS 20 or higher" and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android through Termux, and Docker (SillyTavern). Your data lives in a folder on your machine, set by dataRoot, ./data by default (SillyTavern).

It isn't a model, so you still connect one. Local backends such as KoboldCpp, llama.cpp, and Ollama are "free to use and have no content filter," while cloud APIs "all have content filtering of varying degrees, and most require payment" (SillyTavern). With a cloud API, the same question as a Janitor proxy comes back: the provider reads every prompt. For a fully local model, SillyTavern recommends an Nvidia 3000-series card with at least 6 GB of VRAM. Our guide to using AI privately covers what local models need.

How we compared them

We read every page linked above on October 19, 2026, and took each company at its written word. We didn't create Janitor AI, Character.AI, or OpenRouter accounts or run any chats for this page. If you're also weighing encrypted chat apps, we compare them in Venice AI alternatives.

Choose Janitor AI or Morse

• Choose Janitor AI if you want its library of millions of user-made bots, iOS and Android apps, and a free built-in model, and you're comfortable with JanitorAI Inc. keeping your chats, or with setting up a proxy for other models.
• Choose Morse if you want character chat with no proxy or API key, unlimited character messages on the Free plan, chats stored encrypted on your device instead of a company's servers, and no training, selling, or ads.

Start free, or send a message from the home page without an account first.

Morse publishes this comparison. We've tried to keep it fair; if something's wrong or out of date, email hello@trymorse.ai.

Janitor AI is a trademark of JanitorAI Inc. Morse is not affiliated with or endorsed by JanitorAI Inc.