Character.AI

There are two questions: are you 18, and are you ready to tolerate chat ads?

Who it is for. For anyone who wants a companion to suit their mood: act out a scene with a favorite character, practice English with an imaginary fellow traveler, or talk to a character they created themselves. Messages are free and unlimited.

Who else. For creators. Build a character from a description and greeting in a couple of minutes, add a voice, scene background, and lorebook, and readers can find it in the catalog. You do not need to pay for this.

Who it is not for. Not for those under 18. Since Nov 25, 2025, open chat has been closed to them; the feed, scenes, and image generation remain. Nor for those waiting for a task assistant: a character stays in role rather than searching the web or writing code; for that, there is ChatGPT .

Suitable: section 3 takes you from sign-up through age verification.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Four layers: chat with a character, your own character, voice, and everything the vendor built around chat in 2026.

Chat with a character. Choose a character in the catalog, which the homepage counter says has over 10 million characters, and chat as in a messenger. The character replies in its own voice, keeps the personality from its description, and remembers the conversation: chat has a memory meter, and important facts can be pinned so it doesn't forget them. Don't like a reply? Browse alternatives with the arrow.

Your own character. Name, portrait, greeting, and personality description, then the neural network acts on those instructions. You can keep the character private or publish it in the catalog, where its conversation counter grows through other people's chats. That's how millions of characters appeared: users make them, not the company.

Voice and calls. You can call a character and speak out loud. Choose a voice from the library or record your own.

Around chat. Scenes set the backdrop and premise, while the feed shows other people's moments with a "continue in chat" button. Imagine creates an image right in the conversation, and the world book stores the laws and factions of an invented universe for the character to draw on. In 2026, the vendor added interactive books, comics, and mini-series with chats for their characters.

What the vendor itself shows. In the App Store showcase: a chat with a companion in a school hallway, a call screen with the "Listening..." status, a character builder with four generated portraits, and a "65% left" memory meter. We haven't tested Character.AI for this use case ourselves; the mechanics come from the vendor's help center and other people's tests.

Without an account and an age check they will not let you in.

Step 1. Open character.ai or install the app: for iPhone it is in the App Store, for Android in Google Play.

Step 2. Sign in with Google, Apple, or email. Guest mode is gone, and the "Sign Up to Chat" wall greets anyone without an account, so searches for "c ai without registration" lead only to clones.

Step 3. Complete age verification, which everyone goes through. For most people, a selfie through the Persona service is enough; it asks for a document only as a final step if age isn't clear from the selfie. Persona deletes biometrics and the document within seven days; the age in your Google account does not replace verification. If you don't pass, you get reading mode without an open chat.

Step 4. Choose a character in the catalog or create your own with the Create button and start chatting. The interface language can be changed in settings, with 29 languages available.

"Old version" and "no limits." The old.character.ai address redirects to the new site, and old APKs still ask for age verification after sign-in and send you to reading mode. The vendor has no hacked "premium versions"; such files in search results are not theirs.

Not working? The vendor has a status page, and under load the site puts you in a queue: one or two minutes per the help center, longer according to reviews.

Steps verified Sep 5, 2026 against the live site and the support.character.ai help center

The audience is huge, but nobody has measured quality: the figures here cover demand, time, and store ratings.

Scale. The company claims 20 million monthly users; Kentucky's lawsuit of Jan 8, 2026 repeats the figure and cites a third-party statistics site in a footnote, with no independent measurement available. Sensor Tower estimates that in the first half of 2026, a user spent over 950 minutes a month in the app, or half an hour every day.

Stores. The App Store gives it 4.3 with 556 thousand ratings in the US. Google Play, with 50 million installs, shows 2.1 to 2.3 with 2.4 million reviews depending on the country you browse from (Sep 5, 2026), and recent reviews there complain about the ads and the age check.

There are no arenas or benchmarks for companions; reviews compare Character.AI with nearby alternatives by feel. The character's place among companions in our catalog appears below the card title, and the full tool ranking is on the main page.

Messages are free and unlimited; you pay for silence: no ads, no queue, no slowdown.

Free. All characters, your own characters, calls, and images. Limits are not a counter but friction: full-screen ads right in chat, a wait queue under load, slow mode after a long conversation, and limits on regenerating replies. Nothing works without an account.

c.ai Lite. From $4.99 per month, with pricing varying by region; launched on Sep 4, 2026 and so far appears only in the help center and stores. It gives a daily allowance of replies from the higher-tier model, twice as many pinned memories, and "significantly less" advertising, but not zero.

c.ai+. $9.99 per month or $94.99 per year; the storefront shows the annual price by default, making it easy to mistake for the monthly one. It includes zero ads, the higher-tier DeepSqueak model, no slowdown, unlimited calls, more memory, and early access to new features such as the world book.

Charms. Internal currency sold individually, from $0.99 to $99.99 per pack: skip the queue, bypass ads, or get extra images. Non-refundable and forfeited when the account is deleted.

Four questions: who learns from the conversations, what about teenagers, and who is suing the company.

Chats. Chats are used for model training by default; the vendor offers an opt-out only to EU and UK residents. You grant the company a perpetual license to characters and everything generated, California law applies, and disputes go to arbitration.

Age. After the death of a 14-year-old Florida teen and his mother's lawsuit in October 2024, the company closed open chat to everyone under 18 from Nov 25, 2025 and introduced age verification through Persona. On Jan 7, 2026, Character.AI, its founders, and Google reached a settlement in families' lawsuits; terms were undisclosed and nobody admitted fault. New lawsuits continue to be filed.

Regulators. On Sep 11, 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission requested data from seven companies, including Character.AI, on companions' effects on children, and on Jan 8, 2026, the Kentucky attorney general filed a state lawsuit against the company, described by the office as the first US case against an AI chatbot. California's companion-chatbot law has been in effect since 01.01.2026.

Filter. Pornographic content is prohibited by the terms, and the vendor says it will never support it; requests to remove the filter result in bans. In June 2025, the new CEO promised to make the filter less intrusive. This answers requests for "unrestricted": the vendor has none.

There is no block: the domain was not in the registry of banned websites as of Sep 5, 2026, and the service terms contain no country restrictions. The only geo-restriction found concerns uploading your own voice, and the vendor does not publish its country list.

Over four years, the beta by two former Google employees grew into a platform with millions of characters that faces lawsuits and regulation, while its founders returned to Google.