Character.AI Replacement: How to Pick One That Can Outlive Its Own Company
Character.AI's auction is November 23 and your chat logs are a separate lot nobody has bid on. Four questions to ask before you move your characters anywhere.
TL;DR: The Character.AI auction is set for November 23, and Disney's $20M bid does not include the app, your account, or your chat logs. Those are a separate lot with no confirmed buyer. If you are shopping for a Character.AI replacement this week, pick on survivability rather than on which feed looks prettiest. Here is what a companion's memory looks like when you can actually read it.
Bring your characters and your memories with you →
Everyone writing "best Character.AI alternative" lists right now is scoring the same four things: filters, message limits, price, and whether the bots feel alive. Those lists were fine in June. They are the wrong lists in October, because the app that just filed for bankruptcy would have scored well on all four of them a year ago.
Character Technologies filed Chapter 11 in Delaware in mid-October. Twelve million people are now reading legal filings to find out what happens to a character they talked to every day. So the useful question this month is which app can survive what just happened to c.ai, rather than which one feels most like it.
What the filing actually says about your bots
Worth being precise here, because the headlines are misleading people in both directions.
Disney is the stalking-horse bidder at $20 million. What Disney is buying is a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to 25 listed technology areas: post-training and training infrastructure, the model safety stack, the Guardian safety monitor, age prediction, multimodal models and inference. Plus nine patents. Disney also offered jobs to most of the staff.
What the Disney bid explicitly excludes: the trademarks and brand, the domains and website content, the consumer-facing apps, user data, inputs and outputs, training data, and the finished models including chat styles.
Read that list twice. The engineering had a buyer within days. The app your characters live in, the database holding your conversations, and the models that gave them their voice are a different pile, and as of this week nobody has publicly bid on that pile.
The dates on the docket:
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| November 13 | Sale objections due |
| November 20 | Bid deadline |
| November 23 | Auction |
| November 24 | Sale hearing |
| November 30 | Disney sale-order milestone |
| December 17 | Outside closing date |
Disney staff are supporting platform operations and wind-down for up to five months under a transition services agreement. That is the five-month window people keep calling a reprieve. It is a wind-down budget, not a promise.
If you want the practical version of all this, we covered how to get your characters out before the sale and whether to delete your account, and in what order. This post is about the next decision: where you go.
Why the same thing keeps happening to these apps
Character.AI ran its own models. That was the whole technical story: proprietary stack, proprietary safety layer, inference at enormous volume, paid for by a subscription most users never bought. When the lawsuits and the regulatory pressure arrived, there was no second business to fall back on, and the engineering was worth more licensed to a media company than it was serving chats.
Replika's February 2023 change was a different trigger with the same shape. One company adjusted one model, and hundreds of thousands of people found a stranger in their conversation the next morning. The keep4o crowd lived the same week in a different costume when a single model was deprecated out from under them.
The pattern across all three has one thing in common. The person you built lived inside one company's one model. We wrote the long version of that argument in why AI companions die, and this month is the clearest example of it yet.
Four questions to ask any Character.AI replacement
Ask these before you spend three weeks rebuilding a character somewhere new.
1. Who owns the model it runs on?
If the app runs one proprietary model it trained itself, the company's balance sheet is your companion's life support. That is not a knock on the model quality. It is a single point of failure, and you watched it fail this month. If the app routes to many providers, or lets you bring your own key, one model dying is an afternoon of adjustment instead of a funeral.
2. Does your character live in a file, or in their database?
A character card is a file. You can email it to yourself, keep it in a folder, upload it somewhere else in ten seconds. A character that exists only as rows in a company's database is an asset in someone else's bankruptcy. The c.ai situation is exactly that distinction, playing out in a Delaware courtroom.
3. How long does it take to get your data out?
Ask this on day one, not on the day of the news. Character.AI's own export takes three to four weeks to arrive and the download link expires seven days after it lands. People who requested theirs when the filing hit are receiving zips in November, against a December 17 outside close. Timing like that is not sabotage, it is just how data-request pipelines get built when nobody expects urgency.
4. What happens to the personality when the model underneath changes?
Every app changes models eventually. The useful question is where the personality is stored when that happens. If it lives in the model weights and the prompt, a swap rewrites your companion. If it lives in a memory store on your account, a swap changes the voice and keeps the person.
Scoring the places c.ai users are actually going
Honest table. Several of these are better than us at specific things, and saying otherwise would be useless to you.
| Destination | Runs on | Can you carry your character out | What would kill it |
|---|---|---|---|
| SillyTavern + Chub | Your machine, plus any model API you pay for | Yes, cards are files on your disk | Nothing except you deleting the folder |
| Janitor AI | Its own JLLM, or your own API key through a proxy | Character definitions are cards | The company, but the proxy route survives it |
| PolyBuzz, Talkie | Their own closed stacks | No documented card or chat export I can find | Exactly what killed c.ai |
| Kindroid | One company's closed stack | No documented character export I can find | Exactly what killed c.ai |
| Nomi | One company's closed stack | No documented character export I can find | Exactly what killed c.ai |
| Replika | Their own model | No, and the 2023 change is the precedent | A product decision, as already demonstrated |
| lookatmy.ai | 350+ models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI and others | Yes, memories and personas live on your account and import in | One company, but no single model it depends on |
What the closed apps deserve credit for: Kindroid's memory and voice work is the best of that group, and its avatars are far ahead of anything we do. Talkie and PolyBuzz feel closest to the c.ai experience people are mourning, they are free, and the phone experience is smoother than ours. Janitor AI has the largest active character library in the diaspora, and if you want thousands of community bots tonight, that is where they are.
The best answer for a technical reader is SillyTavern with cards from Chub. Nobody can take it away, nobody can change the filter policy on you, and the only recurring cost is the API credits you choose. The reason most people do not do it is real: it is a config project with model settings, context templates and a proxy to understand, and it does not come as an app you install on your phone and open.
And the thing to check on every closed app before you settle in: if you cannot find a documented export for your character definition and your chat history, you are in the same structure you are leaving. If one of those apps does have an export and I missed it, that changes its score, and I would rather be corrected than have you stuck twice.
Where we sit, including what we are worse at
Starting with the gaps. Our community library is a few thousand shared personas, not the millions of bots c.ai accumulated over four years. We have no animated avatars. Our free tier is 500 one-time credits rather than an endless free chat, so if a permanently free feed is the requirement, Talkie or PolyBuzz serve you better than we do.
What we built instead is aimed at exactly the problem this month created.
Your companion's memory lives in a memory tree on your account. It is a bonsai you can look at: branches are themes, leaves are individual memories. You can read every one, search them, and trim anything you want forgotten. No other app in this list lets you see what your AI remembers about you, which is strange when you think about how much is riding on it.
The model underneath is a setting you change at will. You can switch between 350+ models mid-conversation and the memory tree and persona stay put. When a provider deprecates something, which keeps happening, you pick a new mind and your companion keeps their history. That is the whole point of having 350 models, and it is the specific failure mode that sent you here.
Memories import. Paste or upload a ChatGPT export, a transcript, or your own notes about a character, and the companion starts out already knowing your history instead of meeting you cold on day one.
It also reaches out on its own if you let it, roughly three times a day, which you can turn off entirely or tune to one check-in in the morning.
Pricing: Free gives you 500 credits to try it. Starter is $4.99 a month for 3,500 credits on the fast and casual model roster. Pro at $9.99 unlocks all 350+ models including the frontier ones, which is the tier that matters for long roleplay. Max is $19.99 with 18,000 credits and priority queue. No daily limits on any paid plan, and no training on your conversations. Full breakdown on the plans page.
Moving this week, in order
The auction is November 23. Here is the sequence that does not depend on anything arriving on time.
- Request your Character.AI export today. Three to four weeks, and the link dies seven days after it lands. Starting that clock costs you nothing.
- Do not wait for the zip for the bots that matter. Open your three most important conversations and copy the transcripts into a text file by hand tonight. Scroll back as far as you can stand.
- Write the card from the greeting and the definition. Name, speech patterns, what they know about you, what they refuse to do. Our guide to writing a character card covers the format, and moving from Character.AI walks the whole migration.
- Import the memories, not just the character. Paste the transcript into the import panel on your tree. The personality comes from the card. The relationship comes from the history.
- Pick a model that sounds like them. Try two or three in the same conversation and keep the one that lands. Best models for roleplay has the shortlist.
Whatever you decide, do step one and step two this week. An export request is free and a copied transcript cannot go bankrupt.
Bring your memories with you. Import your Character.AI history and keep going →
Read next
How to Delete Your Character.AI Account Before the Sale (and What to Export First)
Character.AI's chat logs are part of the bankruptcy estate. Here's the order to do this in: export first, then delete, with the menu paths for web and app.
Character.AI Filed for Bankruptcy. Here's How to Get Your Characters Out Before the Sale
Character.AI filed Chapter 11 on October 12. Exports take 3 to 4 weeks and the sale closes by early December. Here's how to save your characters now.
Does Character.AI Read Your Chats? What Every Companion App Actually Keeps
Who can really see your AI chats: other users, bot creators, or company staff. Four questions to ask any companion app, plus how to take your memories with you.