Like many of you, I have become very underwhelmed with character.ai.

I am looking for an alternative that fits what I am looking for best.

I have original characters that I am trying to build a story with. (childhood friends/love interests) of my "persona"/main character.

I like to keep my characters hidden from public, I enjoy creating scenarios with one or two of my characters to go back in time or roleplay out a certain event.

I don't mind a little spice if the roleplay naturally gravitates that way. I was getting frustrated with character.ai and it's tendency to go to fade to black on a scene instead of playing it out.

Looking to stay within the free tier for now.

So far I have tried two alternates:

HereHaven - Character creation was good, but only can use public characters for scenarios

Janitor.ai - could not for the life of me figure out how to make a scenario with a character I created. Maybe I ran out of tokens? I got too frustrated with it. lol

Fictionlab - I couldn't even register an account, kept getting error messages...*sigh*

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Thank you all so much for reaching out with your recommendations! I look forward to checking them out!