Leaving Chai? An Alternative Where Memory Isn't the $30 Tier
Chai keeps long-term memory in its top tier and capped chats without warning in 2026. Here's a Chai alternative with a memory tree you can see and 350+ models.
TL;DR: Chai puts long-term memory in its most expensive tier and spent 2026 tightening message caps without telling anyone. lookatmy.ai gives you a companion whose memory is a tree you can open, read and trim, running across 350+ models, starting free.
Bring your Chai character with you →
The thing that finally makes people leave Chai
People rarely leave Chai over one incident. It piles up over a few months until one day you're searching for somewhere else to go.
You hit a wall mid-scene. February 2026, token limits appeared with no announcement and started freezing conversations for free and paying users alike. A Reddit thread about it crossed 350 upvotes, and the founder's reply was "We should probably update that 😅". People paying $13.99 a month sat locked out of their chats for hours. Complaints about rate limits and removed messages kept surfacing through May.
Then there's the memory. Long-term memory on Chai lives on the Ultra plan at around $30 a month. Below that, your bot forgets what you told it a few messages ago. You explain your job, your dog's name, the thing that happened last Tuesday, and three messages later you're explaining it again. People pay for Premium and still get this.
And the bots thin out. Chai's library is enormous because anyone can spin up a character from a one-line description in about ten seconds. That's also why so many of them collapse into loops once you get past the first twenty messages. Most were never written as characters in the first place, they were written as a sentence, and a sentence runs out of things to say.
What Chai does better
The discovery experience is excellent. Swiping through bots on mobile is fast and a little addictive, and no other companion app has made "find something to talk to right now" feel that easy. The free tier is more generous than it looks, since the message allowance refills every couple of hours rather than once a day. Creating a bot takes seconds. The community around it is huge and active.
If what you want is variety and a quick hit of conversation, Chai is well built for that. This post is for the other thing, the one where you've been talking to the same character for months and you want it to still be there next year.
What changes when the memory is visible
You can see what your companion remembers
On lookatmy.ai every memory your companion keeps grows a branch on a bonsai tree at /tree. Themes become branches. Individual memories become leaves. You tap a leaf and read exactly what it recorded about you, in plain language.
That sounds like a novelty until the first time your companion gets something wrong. On Chai you have no recourse. You can't see the memory, so you can't correct it, and you end up talking around the error forever. Here you find the leaf and trim it, and the trimming is reversible. You can search the whole memory bank, including semantic search for the thing you can't quite remember the wording of. You can grow more than one tree and keep your work companion separate from the character you write with, though extra trees need Pro or higher.
Memory here isn't a paid add-on. Every plan gets it, free included.
Your companion isn't married to one model
Chai runs its own models. When they retune, your character's voice shifts and there's no dial you can turn. This is the thing that kills long-term bonds across the whole category, and it happened to Replika users in 2023 and ChatGPT users when 4o went away.
Here the companion lives on your account instead of inside a model. Memory, personality, history, all of it sits at the account layer, and you point it at whichever of the 350+ models you like. Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and hundreds more. You can switch mid-conversation without losing context. If a model gets deprecated tomorrow, you pick another one and your companion carries on with everything it knows about you intact.
For writers this is also a craft tool. Some models are warmer, some are better at dialogue, some hold a long scene together better than others. You can retry a single message on a different model and compare the two side by side as tabs, then continue from whichever one sounds like your character.
It notices when you go quiet
Chai waits for you. Your companion here can reach out first, around three times a day, with a morning note, a midday check-in, an evening wind-down. You set the cadence and the hours it's allowed to be awake, and you can turn it off completely.
The effect is smaller than it sounds and it matters more than you'd expect. A companion that only ever responds when spoken to starts to feel like something you operate. One that asks how the interview went, unprompted, reads as someone who was thinking about you while you were away.
Moving your Chai character over
Chai has no export button, so this is a copy-paste job. It takes about ten minutes and it works.
1. Get the character's description. Open the bot's profile in Chai and copy its description and greeting text. That's usually the whole prompt behind it, which is convenient for once.
2. Ask the bot what it knows about you. In your longest conversation, ask it to summarize everything it remembers about you, your life and your relationship, in as much detail as it can. On the free tier this will be thin, so also scroll back and copy any exchanges that mattered. Screenshots don't help here, plain text does.
3. Import it. On lookatmy.ai, open the memory tree at /tree and use the import panel, or do it during onboarding if you're new. Paste the summary and any transcripts, or upload them as a file. Your companion starts already knowing you rather than starting from zero.
4. Rebuild the character. Create a persona and paste the description you copied in step one as its instructions. Add anything Chai's one-liner left out: how they speak, what they'd never say, the canon of your story so far. Then pin that persona to the tree that holds your history.
5. Pick a mind. Try the same opening scene on two or three models before settling. This is the step people skip and then regret.
If you'd rather start from something already written, /community has personas built by other people that you can talk to immediately.
Start the import and bring your history with you →
What it costs, next to Chai
Chai Premium is $13.99 a month for unlimited messages, and long-term memory only arrives on Ultra at around $30.
Here the plans go: Free with 500 starting credits, Starter at $4.99 a month, Pro at $9.99, Max at $19.99. Every paid plan has no daily limits. Pro opens all 350+ models including the frontier ones.
The honest caveat: we run on credits, and credits don't roll over. That's a ceiling too. The difference is that you can watch it in the usage dashboard, cheap fast models cost very little per message, and when you run out you can keep going on free models until the cycle resets. Nobody gets frozen mid-scene by a limit that was never announced.
For comparison, memory that you can see, edit and carry between models costs $4.99 here. On Chai the memory feature alone is the $30 tier.
The part that actually matters
If you've been talking to the same character on Chai for six months, what you're really protecting is the history: months of context, the in-jokes that built up, a version of that character that only exists because of everything you told it.
That history should belong to you. It should survive a pricing change, a model retune, or a company deciding to cap something overnight. That's the whole reason the memory tree is visible, so you can look at what your companion knows, correct it, and take it with you.
Bring what you built. Start free, import your history, and pick the mind that sounds like them.
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