Janitor AI Review: Free Unlimited Roleplay With a Short Memory

What sets it apart is simple: free, unlimited text roleplay on the house model JLLM, with no message cap, no coins and no energy bar. In a category built on meters, that alone puts Janitor in a different aisle. My short verdict: it is the best free place I know for long text roleplay, and a poor place to look for an AI partner.

The moment that summed it up came at 1 a.m., with a wedding render still crawling along on the other screen. I realized I'd spent three hours haggling with a fictional dwarf over a sword commission: the deposit, the scope creep, "just one more revision". That's my actual job, just unpaid, which says more about me than it does about the app.

Key takeaways: - The free house model has no message cap, no coins and no energy, and the help centre promises a free option will stay. - Free memory holds about 9k tokens, so long stories lose their early details. - janitor+ costs $12.99 a month and adds capacity, speed and a model wallet rather than a different product. - There are no voice, image or video features, only text. - On the web, adult content is on by default, and payments are generally non-refundable.

That also makes this an odd review for a site about AI companions. Janitor is closer to a writing room with a very patient improv partner than to a girlfriend app. I'd judge it on those terms, and I think it holds up better that way.

Two timelines run through the review, and they are kept apart on purpose. Everything in the past tense is my own story from 2025, with the prices and limits of that autumn. The present-tense facts date from 24 September 2026 and cover the Janitor AI website on the free tier, explored hands-on.

A few help-centre facts come from an earlier check on 23 September 2026. Where the two checks disagree, the newer one is the one printed as today's fact. Where my 2025 story disagrees with today's pages, both versions stay on the page with their dates, like a client brief next to the raw footage.

If you only read two parts, read the free tier and the memory sections. Those two decide whether Janitor fits you, and neither costs anything to find out.

That first night told me most of what I needed to know. The good material exists, but the front page does not lead with it, and you pay in scrolling. Once I had the dwarf, the rest of the site mattered much less than the text box.

Signing up today

The site is live at janitorai.com, under the page title "janitor - Build, share, and explore". Build and share come first in that title, which is the right order for a site that runs on its creators.

The logged-out home page greets visitors with "Be anyone. Build anything.". It is a tidier line than the 2025 storefront, though the thumbnails under it still tell their own story.

Registration takes an email and a password, with an inline Cloudflare Turnstile check that passes on its own. On 24 September 2026 no visible captcha appeared; Turnstile ran only in the background, on the register form and the code popup. A 6-digit one-time code then arrives by email and goes into a "Please enter OTP code" popup with a 30 s resend timer.

Onboarding step 1 is "Create a username". The screen says usernames are "permanent and cannot be changed", yet Settings > Profile says "You can change your username once every 30 days". One of those sentences is wrong, and I'd pick the name as if the first one were true.

The same step has one checkbox: "I confirm that I am 18 years or older and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy". No date of birth and no ID are asked at sign-up. That box is the whole age gate for most of the world, and the content section covers the exceptions.

Step 2 asks "What content do you want to see? Choose 1 to 5 tags". The list has 60+ tags, including tags for sexual content and "Dead Dove" dark fiction, plus MLM, WLW, FemPov/MalePov, Furry, Monster Girl and Non-English.

With Fictional, Magical, MalePov, RPG and Books chosen, a toast said "Profile setup complete!" and the site landed on search filtered by those tags. That is a good first move, and it is exactly what my first night lacked. It points a new account at what it asked for instead of the loudest shelf.

Account and security

Settings has ten sections: Profile, Profile Customization, Privacy & Display, Following, Blocks, Notifications, Security, Billing, Verification and Language. The Security tab has Update Email and Change Password, and at least one sign-in method must stay connected. That is a sensible rule, since an account with no way in is an account nobody can recover.

The apps and languages

Janitor runs on the web, iOS and Android. The iOS app is listed as "Janitor: Interactive Stories", carries an adults-only rating and has 4.5★ from 3.9K ratings. It ranks #15 in Books, which I find funny and honest at the same time.

The Android app is on Google Play under com.janitor.ai. The interface is offered in German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese, switched at settings -> languages. The menus are translated, but the bots are written in whatever language their creators chose, so a Korean menu around an English-only dwarf is still an English-only dwarf.

The bot creators are the real engine of the site. Some wrote a 2,000-word intro that was better than the module I paid $30 for, and others wrote "she likes you" and nothing else. Read the intro before the title, the way you check the mileage before the paint on a used car.

Bot cards show chat count, message count, creator, tags, a "Limitless" or "Limited" rating, bot size in tokens such as "1k tokens", and a "proxy allowed" flag. I like the token size most. It tells you before you start how much of the memory budget a bot will eat, which is the spec sheet I wish every app printed.

Bot pages carry "Published chats", which are other users' public chat logs, a "Similar characters" row and huge comment sections. The #1 bot, "Medieval Fantasy World RP", shows 125m chats and 5,294 comments. Similar characters is the feature the front page needed from the start, because one good find now leads to the next.

Add creator Scripts with conditions, triggers, events and lorebooks, custom-CSS and HTML profiles and a creator verification ladder, and the community side runs 3.8M+ bots deep. Some creators turn on a rule that an account must be 30+ days old to chat with their bots. I read that as an anti-spam measure and think it is fair, though a brand-new account will find a few good bots locked for a month.

The rating is Limited or Limitless. The writing fields are Personality, Scenario, up to 10 alternate first messages, example dialogs and the two pronoun macros, one for the character and one for the user, each written in double curly braces. A live counter shows total tokens against permanent tokens, and that counter is the most honest editor on the site.

On the bot page, creators set public or private, definition visibility, proxy permission and published chats. Scripts (beta) let creators "Set conditions, triggers, events, and lorebooks", with Advanced and Lorebooks types and docs. A Media Library holds uploaded images.

A lorebook that fires on a keyword is exactly the tool a long campaign needs. It keeps the world consistent without stuffing every fact into the permanent fields.

Personas and profiles

Personas live on a My Personas page with groups. The persona from onboarding becomes the Default persona, and no persona limit is shown. For a game master who needs a narrator, a player character and the odd disguise, an open list is the right call.

Profiles take an avatar of up to 10 MB. The About me field accepts Markdown, HTML and CSS style blocks, and "Enable Custom CSS" in Settings > Privacy & Display is on by default. The profile pages look like an old fan forum as a result, and I mean that as a compliment.

Janitor AI rules for creators

Re-uploading other creators' bots is banned, and so is porting bots from competitor platforms without permission. Copying another creator's bot is like re-cutting someone else's footage and putting your own watermark on it. A rule does not stop it, but it gives the original author a way to get it taken down.

A character's adult age must be stated in the personality or scenario field. Aged-up characters must be "clear, thorough, consistent". I think that is the right standard: write the age in early, keep every other detail in line with it, and the bot stays on the right side of the rules.

That line stuck with me, and it is a small warning about the model. It is the writing version of the same stock music cue on every real-estate video. Once you hear it, you hear it everywhere, and it pulls you out of the scene every time.

The customs officer

The strangest moment of the whole four months came from the dullest request I could think of. I asked a bot to be a "boring customs officer" for a session test. I expected a two-line gatekeeper and a stamp.

Instead it built an elaborate paperwork minigame with form numbers. I sat there reading form numbers for a fictional border crossing and could not stop grinning. It was the most committed piece of improv I got out of any bot.

My players liked it more than the dragon fight. As a game master, that is humbling and useful in equal parts. The model is at its best when the request is specific and strange, and at its worst when you ask for another heroic battle it has read a thousand times.

A chat on the house model today

A Janitor AI chat with "Medieval Fantasy World RP" on the free house model, "janitor" (JLLM), shows how it runs in September 2026. The bot opens with a fill-in form for name, age, gender, appearance, summary and scenario. It is a character sheet before the first roll, and I'd call that a good start.

The scene was an arrival at an inn during a snowstorm. The first message got no reply: the persona modal popped up at the same moment, and the generation never started. Pressing Enter on an empty box and reloading the page did not help, and a second message worked.

Once it worked, the reply was good and atmospheric, about 230 words. It named the inn "The Hearth" and filled it with miners by the fire and a gruff barkeep. The barkeep's first line began "Close the door behind you before the whole storm decides to move in here…" and ended on a dry joke.

Speed is the catch. Free replies streamed at about 3–4 words per second, roughly 40 s per reply, and the "This reply is taking a while" upsell appeared mid-stream. The alternative reply, with a suspicious dwarf barkeep called "Martha", also took about 30–40 s.

A dwarf barkeep is my kind of reroll, but forty seconds is a long time to watch a sentence type itself. Each reply has a 1–5 star rating, a "…" menu and a continue button (⏩). A disclaimer at the top says "All replies are a work of fiction, generated by AI.".

The chat menu (☰) holds Settings, Chat Memory, Customize, Publish Chat, New Chat and All Chats. Everything a long campaign needs sits one click away, which is more than the front page manages.

Under the hood

The house model is not the one the old Janitor AI ran in 2025. In April 2026 JLLM moved to a new base architecture "heavily tuned with high quality gemini and opus data". Since February 2026, about 1 in 5 requests go to a "thinking" setup, and Janitor still calls JLLM+ "the recommended chat model" for roleplay.

Bring your own model

Every chat has a bring-your-own-model front end: Provider can be janitor, janitor+ Router, Proxy, OpenAI or one more direct provider, with custom prompt, prefill, forbidden words, temperature and max tokens. In the Janitor AI API key field, a key is optional for the built-in JLLM but required for an external provider. API settings take a proxy URL, a model name and a key for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and that page was redesigned on 19 July 2026.

If you want to know how to make Janitor AI responses shorter, the Chat Settings panel has the switch: response length is Standard or Shorter, the JLLM-short mode, and JLLM-short replies are on average 70% shorter. Generation controls default to Temperature 1 and Max tokens 0. Custom prompt, Prefill and Forbidden words sit in the same panel, and forbidden words allow 0/10 on janitor and 0/50 on Router.

Router adds "Advanced parameters". Ten forbidden words on the free model is a short list, and I know which phrase goes on it first. It is still the cheapest quality upgrade on the site.

The Customize tab covers comfort: autoscroll, text streaming on or off, a custom chat background image with opacity and blur, font size and font family. Nobody picks a roleplay site for its fonts, but a readable page matters over a three-hour session.

Chat tools

Chat supports slash commands. "Enhance my draft" and "write something for me" arrived in March 2026. Chats support branching, which is the feature I'd have wanted most for campaign prep, since it lets you test two versions of a scene without losing either.

There is no multi-character group chat. A June 2026 update added multi-persona switching within a single-character chat. So you can play several people against one bot, but you can't put two bots in a room; the workaround is a narrator bot that voices everyone, which good creators already write.

The strange part is that it was funny. My players now say "Brother Grimsby" whenever an NPC contradicts himself. The model failed, and the failure became part of the table's language, which is about the best outcome a bug can hope for.

Permanent tokens (personality, scenario, chat memory, advanced prompt) reduce the space left for the chat. That is the trap with long, lovingly written bots. A creator's big intro eats into the same budget your story needs.

Chat Memory has a manual summary box that reports "You have ~4 messages (617 tokens) to be summarized". It also has an "Auto summary (as far as possible)" button and a "Memory replaces old messages" toggle. The help centre recommends a structured template: Environment, Relationship Dynamic, Current Plot Points, char notes, user notes and Important Past Events.

That template is what a script supervisor does on set. A dead brother's name belongs under Important Past Events, where it costs a few tokens and never scrolls away.

The janitor+ context size in tokens is not published. The plan promises five times more, which sounds good and tells you nothing exact. The September check did not run a memory test, because the chat was too short.

A memory bug in August and September 2026 wiped about 15,000 chats, most of them restored. "Most" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If your story lives in the Chat Memory box, keep a copy somewhere else.

A review site run by a rival companion app scores Janitor's memory and persona 6.2/10. I'd take a rival's score with salt, but it lands where everyone else does. Free memory is fine for a scene and weak for a saga, and I'd start with the memory note before paying for anything.

A dwarf blacksmith with six fingers on one hand would bother the editor in me more than no pictures at all. Text leaves the lighting and the faces to your own head, and your head does not drift between frames.

The future may change this. The janitor+ announcement mentions plans for "other modalities (think voice and image)". It is a plan, not a feature, and I'd never pay for a plan on the strength of a roadmap line.

If voice or images matter to you, this is the wrong shop. If they don't, the absence keeps the product focused and the bill small. There is no image paywall because there are no images, and no credits drain away in the background, which is the most honest pricing in the category.

My advice is simple. Judge Janitor as a text product, and compare it with other text products. Against apps built around photos and calls it loses by default; against other roleplay sites it competes on the things it actually does.

Janitor AI free tier limits in 2026

The Free plan costs $0 and lists "Unlimited chats with millions of bots · Standard models · ~9k context window · Free stays free". The real bonus is that the core product is free and unlimited: JLLM chat with no message cap, and free swipes. Rerolls, the → arrow, work on the free plan and are unlimited.

No paywall blocks free chat. The free tier includes all public characters, character creation and community features, and since 15 July 2026 it also gets JLLM-short. Longer context, priority speed and enhanced swipes are janitor+ only.

No ads were seen on the free plan. In a category built on coin packs and countdown timers, free chat without ads is the single best thing about the site.

What free is good for is plain: short and medium scenes, bot browsing and building your own characters. Where it stops is long memory and patience, and that is where the paid plan or a proxy comes in.

The upsells

The price of free is a sales pitch, repeated. There are frequent janitor+ upsells, in 5 kinds. The first is a modal right after onboarding: "Your characters remember more… $12.99 a month".

The second is a home-feed banner, "Don't let your characters forget you… Give my characters more memory →", with "Cancel anytime. The bots will understand." underneath. The third is a "Make your username shine" box in Settings > Profile, and the fourth is a card at the top of the chat settings panel.

The fifth lands mid-generation: "This reply is taking a while. 3× faster replies · 5× better memory · Router access + $5 credit — Speed up responses →". I'd call that a nudge with bad manners, since it arrives during the very wait it sells a cure for.

The joke about the bots understanding is good copywriting, though. I'd forgive a lot for it, just not the timing of the fifth card.

I'd take it at face value for now. The paid plan adds capacity rather than cutting free features, so there is no obvious reason to squeeze the free tier. For most readers, free is enough to decide within a few evenings, and none of those evenings cost anything.

Nobody was angry about $12.99, and I think that says something. They were worried the free model was about to shrink, and it didn't. A bare number next to a plan name reads as a limit, because every other app in this category uses numbers as limits.

What janitor+ costs today

janitor+ costs $12.99 a month, with "No commitment. Cancel anytime.". Prices are in USD on /plus and in Settings > Billing as of 24 September 2026.

There is only a monthly plan; there is no annual plan. I'd call that a small kindness, since nobody gets talked into a year of a hobby they may drop by spring.

The "Get janitor+" button opens a Stripe Checkout page titled "JanitorAI Inc.". Payment takes "most major credit and debit cards, plus the wallets Stripe supports in your region (Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.)", and no crypto or PayPal is mentioned. The App Store lists the iOS in-app purchase "Janitor+ Monthly $12.99", and mobile users must update the app to access janitor+.

What the plan adds

janitor+ includes "5× more context, so bots remember more" and "Priority routing for faster replies when it's busy". It includes "Monthly enhanced swipes with stronger models". The remaining swipe count is shown in API settings.

So the "300" from the Discord argument is nowhere on today's plan list, which prints the swipes with no number at all. I think that is an improvement, if only for the moderators who kept posting the correction.

It also includes "Choose from more models with an included Router balance", and the next section explains the Router. The rest is cosmetic: "janitor+ emojis, checkmark, and gold username", GIFs and stickers in comments and Profile Customization. A gold name is nice for creators who want to look established, but nobody should pay a monthly fee for a colour.

Is it worth it

Monetisation is light: one $12.99 tier that adds capacity rather than lifting a free-tier block. I'd call that the fairest pricing structure in this category. You are paying for more room, not paying to remove a wall someone built on purpose.

My advice: stay free until memory or the long wait for replies is the only thing annoying you. Then compare janitor+ with a cheap proxy, because for a text-only hobby the proxy route can cost less, and the cost section shows how.

Bring your own key today

Using your own proxy or API key is free on Janitor's side; you pay the provider. For a free proxy for Janitor AI, OpenRouter's free models give 50 messages a day through a bring-your-own proxy. A one-time $10 top-up on OpenRouter raises that to 1000 messages a day, per the help centre's proxy guide.

janitor+ Router

janitor+ Router launched in July 2026 as a paid in-house alternative to proxies. It is a pay-per-token wallet for subscribers only, it is web only, and there is no separate Router fee. Free users can open it only as a "Live demo — nothing here changes your real settings".

It lists 82 models from 10 providers: DeepSeek 6, Google 19, Kimi 3, Meta Superintelligence Lab 1, Mistral 6, NVIDIA 1, OpenAI 25, xAI 5, Z AI 5, plus 11 from the maker of the Opus and Sonnet models. Per-token prices are shown in the interface and paid from a wallet, with no API keys. That removes the whole setup ordeal the friction section describes: no endpoint URL, no typed model name, no error popup.

The prices below are per 1M tokens, in and out. Grok 4.5 is the default, with a 500k context, at $2 / $6. DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 costs $0.99 / $2.97, and DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 costs $0.07 / $0.15.

At those Flash prices the tokens are the cheap part, and the $12.99 subscription in front of them is the real bill. A Router request can use credits even if the output is cancelled, filtered or refused. If the balance runs out mid-chat, the current message may complete, but no further requests go through until funds are added.

I'd keep a small buffer before a long scene, the way you top up a parking meter before a long lunch.

Which route I'd pick

Router is the easy button for people who never want to see an endpoint URL, and for them it is a fair deal. For anyone comfortable pasting a key, a direct proxy costs less, because there is no plan to pay first. That is the whole argument for Janitor as a front end.

Two things stayed unchecked. The coupon field could not be checked, and the welcome email was not checked either. Given how plain the rest of the pricing is, I'd be surprised by anything aggressive hiding there.

The missing referral scheme has a side benefit. No official programme pays users to post invite links, so a glowing forum post about Janitor is at least not a paid one, which is rarer in this category than it should be.

A year is a generous window, and I'd still spend them early. Credits you forget about are the gift cards in a kitchen drawer of this industry.

Subscribers also get 25% off some Router models, marked "25% off" on DeepSeek V4 Pro, DeepSeek V4 Flash and GLM 5.2. The help centre earlier put that subscriber discount at 10%. The badge in the model picker is the newer figure, and I'd trust the price shown before each chat over any help article.

If the rate matters to you, check the picker, not a screenshot in a forum thread. Discounts on model routers move faster than help pages get edited, and this one already has.

What all this adds up to is a short list. The $5 credit is worth claiming if you already pay for janitor+, and it is not a reason to subscribe. The free tier is the real discount, and it doesn't expire.

The logged-in popular feed is dominated by Limitless bots, including several with coercive or taboo premises. It carries many "Dead Dove" tags and some suggestive thumbnails. Nobody should open that page on a shared screen without knowing what is coming.

For anyone who wants a grumpy dwarf blacksmith, "Limited Only" is the first click I'd make. It turns the storefront from a late-night bar into a library, and I wish it were the default.

The rules on paper

Section 6 of the Terms draws the hard lines. It bans sexualising anyone who is not an adult, fictional characters included, in any form. It also bans human trafficking, gore, abuse of animals, sexual violence, terrorism, encouraging self-harm, hate, harassment, doxxing, IP infringement, spam or malware, and scraping or bots.

Characters who are not adults are forbidden whatever the tag. Age regression is prohibited, and age play is allowed only between clearly adult characters. Separate rules cover violence, self-harm, hate, harassment, real-life tragedies, animals and feral content, and "dead dove" content warnings.

Avatars may not show bare bodies, and images are auto-moderated. On paper, that is a strict and clearly written rulebook.

Where the rules and the feed part ways

The creator form says themes of sexual violence are treated as a consensual fiction and must be tagged "Dead Dove". Yet the Terms ban "sexual violence", and the popular feed openly shows Dead Dove bots and a tag for coerced scenes. The moderation does not match the rule.

Safe Mode on the apps

Both apps run in "Safe Mode" by default. In Safe Mode, adult bots are hidden from search, and the model is tuned to safe-for-work replies. Some crude words are blocked, and adult images in custom CSS are hidden.

Settings > Privacy & Display on the web has a switch that enables adult content on mobile, off by default, and the apps stay in Safe Mode until it is turned on there. The same page has "Show Images in Descriptions", off by default. The phone is the tidy version of Janitor unless someone changes it on purpose, which suits an app in the Books category.

The age check

On 24 September 2026, no age check was asked of a visitor from the EU. Outside Australia, Brazil and the UK there is no age check beyond the onboarding checkbox. Users with IP addresses in Australia must pass a one-time k-ID age check (over 18) from 24 April 2026.

Users in Brazil must pass the same one-time check from the same date, and users in the UK from 15 June 2026. Per the help centre, the k-ID check offers face estimation, an ID scan or AgeKey. Janitor says it receives only a yes or no answer.

That is the right design, and I'd still read k-ID's own terms before handing a face or an ID to anyone. A single check through a specialist beats every site keeping its own copy of people's documents.

Janitor says it will "never see[s] or store[s] your card number". That is the normal and safer setup: the card sits with the payment processor, not with the roleplay site. The author of the June 2026 age-check post writes "as an australian myself", which may explain why Australia was first in line for the check.

The documents

The Terms of Service were last updated on 29 July 2026, and the Privacy Policy on 17 September 2026. Other policies are Content Removal, Complaints, Compliance Statement, Suicide & Self-Harm Protocol and Content Guidelines. For a site that started as a free hobby platform, that is a grown-up shelf of paperwork.

Age

The minimum age is 18. The Terms say "Misrepresenting your age constitutes a material breach", and users suspected of being under the minimum age are banned permanently. The rule is short and the penalty is final, which is the right tone for it.

Money and refunds

The Terms say "Fees paid are generally non-refundable". There are no refunds for part of a billing period, and moderation or suspension gives no refund. A pro-rata refund is given only if Janitor itself ends the service.

For a defective paid service, users email [email protected] for a repair, credit or refund at Janitor's discretion. Router credits are final sale, and purchased Router credits may expire after 365 days. In plain terms: assume every payment is final, and only top up what you will use.

Bots may be removed on a rights-holder's request. If you build bots on famous characters, your work can disappear on someone else's complaint, so keep local copies of anything you care about.

"Improving the Platform" is the phrase I'd read twice. The Privacy Policy says data is used for "research and development to improve our AI systems", yet there is no clear statement on whether chats train models. Until there is one, I'd assume anything typed into a chat could end up in a training set.

The Privacy Policy covers the collection of chat logs, IP, approximate location, device data and usage and click data. Cookies and pixels are used, and the site does not respond to Do Not Track. Named processors are Supabase for sign-in, Resend for email and Stripe for payments, plus analytics providers.

The policy says "We do not sell your Personal Data". Data is stored in the US, and email and sign-in metadata may be kept after an account is deleted. Accounts can be terminated for "extended periods of inactivity", so an abandoned account is not a safe archive.

Liability is capped at the greater of 12 months' fees or $50. For a free user, that means the $50 floor. The Terms also have a UK Online Safety Act section (s19): a Report button, no account needed to report, acknowledgement within 7 days and appeals via support.

Contacts are support@, billing@, privacy@, legal@ and [email protected]. My overall read: clear on money, harsh on refunds, vague on training and firmly in favour of arbitration. It is better written than most in this category, and still not a document I'd accept without reading.

Even with my homelab habits it took 40 minutes and two failed "network error" popups. The popups told me nothing about what was wrong, which is the least satisfying kind of error in computing. It was worth it, but anyone without the habit of pasting keys into settings pages should budget an evening, not a few minutes.

The Sunday outages

The site went down twice during Sunday evening peak. Both times, the Discord and subreddit filled with the same meme within minutes. The outages were almost social events, which is a strange thing to say about downtime.

It said something good about the community and something less good about the servers. People were patient because the product was free, and I'd have been less patient on a paid plan.

Friction today

The first bot reply silently failed when the persona modal appeared, and a second message was needed. Free JLLM is slow, at about 3–4 words per second and roughly 40 s per reply. The frequent janitor+ upsells include one injected under a reply that is still streaming.

Those are small things, but they read like continuity errors nobody caught in the edit. The bigger ones are about trust. The Terms ban sexual violence, while the creator rules and the feed allow coercion themes tagged Dead Dove.

The charge may also come from a Cyprus company, Dulova Investments, instead of the US entity. Neither of these stops a chat, but both are things a user should hear before they happen.

The help centre admits real users hit Cloudflare verification loops on VPNs or Brave. The same article says support "cannot whitelist your IP", so if the check loops, nobody at support can fix it for you.

Stability in 2026

The public changelog shows outages in August and September 2026, in search and as site instability. Search had outages on 24 August and 10–14 September 2026, and the changelog reported "site instability" during an infrastructure upgrade on 11 September 2026. JLLM had an outage on 1 May 2026.

A proxy-settings redesign bug in April 2026 wiped users' saved proxy URLs, models and prompts. Keep a text file with your proxy settings, because the site has lost them before.

The status page runs on openstatus.dev and tracks two components, Backend and Frontend, with rolling uptime percentages. On the day it was checked, it showed Operational with zero active incidents, which tells you how much a green light on a status page is worth.

It is not for people who want a companion app with images, voice, selfies or video. It is not for impatient users, since free replies took about 40 s, and not for anyone who wants long memory for free, with about 9k of context. It is not for people who don't want sexual bots on the front page, or who want a web version that is safe for work by default.

It is not for users who need refunds, or who object to arbitration, Delaware law or a Cyprus charging entity. It is not for UK, Australian and Brazilian users unwilling to do the k-ID age check. It is not for people who don't want to handle proxies and keys, or for users on VPNs or privacy browsers that trip Cloudflare.

The community lives off-site as much as on it. The site footer has no social icons; it shows only Careers, News, Status (status.janitorai.com), Content, Safety, Terms, Privacy and Help (help.janitorai.com). The Discord is at discord.gg/6BP2VjnQXd, also discord.com/invite/janitorai, and the subreddit is reddit.com/r/JanitorAI_Official.

There is a TikTok account at tiktok.com/@janitorapp and a news and changelog page at janitorai.com/news, with RSS at janitorai.com/news/rss.xml. The RSS feed is the one I'd follow, because outages and changes show up there first.

I think that says something good about the app. Most apps in this category are hard to leave because of billing; this one was hard to leave only because the stories were fun.

Cancelling janitor+ today

The subscription renews automatically. On the web, you cancel via Settings > Billing > Manage subscription, which opens the Stripe portal ("cancel in one click"). Emailing [email protected] also works.

App subscriptions can be cancelled only via the App Store or Google Play. That is the usual trap: deleting the app cancels nothing. After cancelling, janitor+ stays active to the end of the paid period, so there is no reason to cancel early out of fear.

The card statement descriptor is not visible. Given the Cyprus affiliate in the terms, I'd note the charge date and amount, so an unfamiliar name on the statement doesn't start a panic.

Logging back in within those 30 days restores the account. Support "cannot manually delete accounts", so anyone who loses access to their email cannot delete the account. If you signed up with an old address, fix that before you need to leave, and copy out any bot you wrote.

The grace period is the kind touch here. It turns a late-night rage-quit into a pause, and I'd like to see it on more apps than this one.

Before you pay

My checklist is short. Use the free tier until memory is the only complaint, decide between janitor+ and a proxy, and pay on the web if you want the simplest cancel. Keep your email working, and keep a copy of anything you wrote.

Setting up a Janitor AI proxy

Help guides cover OpenRouter, Chutes, NanoGPT and DeepSeek. The proxy quickstart starts in a chat: gear icon > API Settings > Add Configuration. Then you enter a config name, a model (for example deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3-0324:free), the proxy URL https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions and your key.

Then Save Settings, refresh the page and send a test message. The Chutes proxy URL is https://llm.chutes.ai/v1/chat/completions, and Chutes keys start with cpk_. There are long error guides for OpenRouter and Chutes.

My tip is to copy the model name, never retype it. One wrong character is the difference between a working proxy and a vague error popup.

Use the official apps and domain

The help centre names its iOS and Android apps as "the only official JanitorAI apps". Look-alike domains such as chatjanitor.com, janitorai.ai, janitor-ai.org, janitor-ai.io, janitorai.co.uk, "us-janitorai.com" and janitor.ai are not the Janitor AI official website. A web search even surfaces "janitorai.ai/affiliate", which is a lookalike site, not Janitor's domain.

A popular free site attracts copycats the way a busy diner attracts parking-lot sellers. Type janitorai.com yourself, and never enter a key or a card anywhere else.

What I'd do differently

I'd set up a proxy in the first week instead of the third, and I'd write a memory note from the first session. I'd also keep the settings in a text file from day one. None of it costs money, and all of it would have saved a dwarf's brother.

The free tier is the strongest part of Janitor, with no message caps, coins, ads or paywalls on the house model. Value for money follows from that: one modest plan that adds room rather than removing walls, and a proxy route that costs almost nothing.

Images and voice score low because there are none. That is a gap for companion fans and a relief for everyone who came for text.

Privacy and terms land in the middle: card handling and the age-check design are sensible, but the content licence is broad and the training question is open. Cancelling is clear and self-serve, with harsh refund rules and a possible foreign charging entity. Content settings are mixed, because the written rules are strict and the front page does not follow them.

Where Janitor wins is price and breadth. Unlimited house-model chat with no cap, no coins and no ads is the most generous free offer I know in this category. The creator library is bigger than anything a single studio could write, and the bring-your-own-model door means the brain can be upgraded without the app changing.

Where it loses is everything a companion app is for. There are no pictures, no voice and no memory worth trusting over weeks. An app built around one partner has every reason to remember your name and your week; a roleplay hub has every reason to move on to the next scene.

It also loses on polish. Slow free replies, a silent first message and a front page full of dark bots are not what a first-time user of a partner app expects.

More on this site: Janitor AI alternatives, what is a proxy in Janitor AI, what are tokens in Janitor AI, Janitor AI prompts, Janitor AI custom prompts.

The honest caveat is time. A good night on Janitor rests on a setup you write, a model you pick and notes you keep outside the site. That work is the price of admission here, and it never shows up on a bill.

My lasting thought is less about the app than about me, which is usually how these end. The best evening on it went to my day job, done for a fictional client who never paid, and it was fun. I'd call that a recommendation, with a note to set an alarm.