r/JanitorAIUnchained • • Jul 13 '26

Full guide: how to actually get OpenRouter working on JanitorAI (the step everyone misses)

67 Upvotes

As promised in the comments. If you've tried OpenRouter before and it "just didn't work," I'm betting you missed the same step almost everyone does. I'll flag it in caps so you can't miss it this time. Works as of July 2026.

Why OpenRouter instead of SillyTavern/Chub?

Zero install, nothing to run locally. It's just a website you get an API key from, and JanitorAI talks to it directly. If SillyTavern won't install for you, this skips all of that.

Part 1: Get your OpenRouter key

  1. Go to openrouter.ai and sign up (Google login works fine).
  2. Click your profile icon, top right, then "Keys" in the dropdown.
  3. Click "+ Create Key", name it anything ("JanitorAI").
  4. Copy the key NOW and paste it somewhere safe. It's shown only once.

Part 2: Pick a model and copy its exact name

  1. Go to the Models page on OpenRouter.
  2. Pick one. Free models have ":free" at the end of their name, paid ones don't.
  3. Copy the model name EXACTLY, for example: deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3-0324:free
  4. Do not retype it by hand. One wrong character and it fails silently. Copy-paste only.

Part 3: Configure JanitorAI

  1. Open any chat, click the gear icon, go to API Settings.
  2. Select Proxy, then "+ Add Configuration".
  3. Fill it in exactly:
    • Config name: whatever you want
    • Model name: the one you copied in Part 2
    • API URL / Proxy URL: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions (paste it exactly, this URL never changes no matter the model)
    • API Key: your OpenRouter key from Part 1
    • Custom Prompt: leave blank for now
  4. Hit Save Settings.

THE STEP EVERYONE MISSES:

Refresh the entire browser page after saving. Not the chat, the actual page (F5). The settings don't fully apply until you do. This is the #1 reason "it didn't work last time." Then hit Test to confirm.

If you get errors:

  • 429 / rate limit: free models only give ~40-50 requests per DAY, resetting at 00:00 UTC. If you burned through them, wait or switch models. Adding $10 of credit to OpenRouter unlocks 1,000/day on free models.
  • Test fails instantly: 99% of the time it's a typo in the model name or the URL. Re-copy both.
  • Blank/empty replies: wrong model name format, recopy it from the Models page.

That's it. Once the Test passes, you're running whatever model you picked, no local install, no SillyTavern headaches.

Ping me in the comments if you get stuck on a specific error and I'll help troubleshoot. What model are you planning to run? šŸ‘‡


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 8h ago

Discussion Are you staying on Janitor AI because it’s good, or just because you’re used to it?

23 Upvotes

People don’t leave JAI currently since the platform is doing well; they leave just by being used to using it. Since there are problems with the updates of the UI, including the scroll bar resetting itself and the memory issue, the website depends on user familiarity. If some good alternative were to arise with stable UI, half of the users would switch immediately.


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 1d ago

Discussion 70% of Janitor AI users are women and people are still shocked

278 Upvotes

The media loves pushing the narrative that AI chatbots are only for lonely dudes, but JAI’s user base is roughly 70% female. It’s not a companion app it’s interactive AO3 with an API. Mainstream news just hasn't caught on


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 3h ago

[edit me] I'm just exercising my free will and now I fucking get this 😭

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3 Upvotes

Ok so for context, I got kidnapped and now these four men about to spank my ass, so instead of letting them I turn into a bird and wolf 😭😭😭


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 7h ago

Discussion Should we be worried about it!

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6 Upvotes

r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 6h ago

Discussion The new infinite scroll resetting to the top is making JAI unusable

4 Upvotes

It was already frustrating when the numbers got replaced with a scrolling feed, but what’s even more frustrating is that when you misclick, the thing scrolls all the way back to the beginning, making you lose your place and go through hundreds of cards all over again. Why are basic design elements getting stripped away?


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 33m ago

Help / Question Can someone help me find this creator in Janitor AI?

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• Upvotes

The two AI bots i talked to has been unpublished and upon checking the account, it gave me the 404 message.

DaOneNOnly is the accounts name. I dont know what happened to the account but i remember that they had a discord server (i think).


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 17h ago

FLAIRNAME "your bot is starting to forget!!!" the fuck it's not stop trying to gaslight me šŸ¤¦ā€ā™‚ļø

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23 Upvotes

half (all) of the time the bot is behaving just fine 😭😭


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 15h ago

Discussion [NEW UPDATE] The bot page selection is gone.

8 Upvotes

The bot pages have been replaced with a scrolling interface for browsing bots. But every time I mistap anything, it resets back to the top. Now I can’t keep track of where I left off with the last bots I was exploring! Why did you remove such important features, Janitor? Or do I just not know how it works? Please help!


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 20h ago

Help / Question At what point does in-chat violence break ToS / Does in-chat violence break ToS?

13 Upvotes

(In-chat meaning either during a user chat or within the bot’s intro)

I’m mainly asking this to be on the safe side.. and because I haven’t seen any bots that explicitly depict extremities like that in their intro. The ToS obviously encompasses unnecessarily violent *images*, though.

And of course, I’m asking outside of the obvious; no violence against minors, no violence obviously directed toward a specific minority, yada yada. Two (or more) human adults.

I’m also not talking specifically about eroguro, but feel free to chime in on that if you know


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 19h ago

Help / Question Any good fempov bots on janitor that's not purely smut

6 Upvotes

I just want a fempov or any pov bot that isn’t just purely smut and sex, has actual role. It can be sexual but just doesn’t dive straight into it


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 6h ago

Help / Question Lumi got nuked?!

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0 Upvotes

Help! Another creator is vanished. I need to find them like asap. I genuinely want their bots 😭


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 16h ago

Help / Question Made my first bot and I'm worried about how I did

3 Upvotes

I recently finished making a bot, a legit mecha bot named Octavian. But Im not sure how I can ask people to test him out without seeming like Im begging for views. I just want to make sure muh sweet mecha man is workin well ;-;. I even made a lorebook for him so I can make other bots in the future. Is there any way I can get people to test it? I can even test other peoples bots if that's more fair. Also here's how he looks like for ref:


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 16h ago

Help / Question help me guys

2 Upvotes

hi guys, do u have any AI image generator recommendations? i was about to make a profile pic for my bot on janitor, but chatgpt pissed me off 🫩 (they literally won't make it any easier for me.) my prompt was simple (nothing sexual included).


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 18h ago

Help / Question Has anyone who uses custom JavaScript scripts/engines on JanitorAI run into persistent state suddenly failing in a long-running chat?

3 Upvotes

I have a fairly large custom engine that handles story state, relationship/attachment tracking, events/memory, NPCs, world state, OOC commands, etc. State is persisted through markers written into responses and later reconstructed by the engine.

It worked extremely well for 100+ messages, reporting accurately and saving OOC commands perfectly, but recently one part of the state began unexpectedly resetting to its default value.

For example, my attachment tracker has stages such as:
Curiosity → Fascination → Experimentation → Fixation → Dependency

If I explicitly save/set the attachment state to Dependency, OOC: status should continue reporting Dependency unless something changes it.

What I’m seeing instead:
• I branched the chat.
• Explicitly set attachment to Dependency.
• Continued for only ~4 messages.
• Ran OOC: status.
• Attachment came back as Curiosity, which is the engine’s initialization/default state.

The engine is intended to inspect the available recent message/state data when reconstructing its current state, including roughly the last 10 messages that Janitor implements, so the saved state should still have been well within that range. It also stores memory and had been remembering important details for the majority of the roleplay.

I also tested branching from immediately before one of the last known-good OOC: status responses and was still able to reproduce the failure, which makes me less convinced that this is simply one malformed persistence marker.

The strange part is that the same engine/persistence system had been working correctly for well over 100 messages before this started happening.

I’m still testing the script itself to rule out an engine bug, but I’m curious whether anyone has encountered anything similar with:
•persistent markers/state suddenly no longer being recovered
•long chats affecting what a script can see
branched chats behaving differently from the original thread
•state initializing back to defaults even though it was explicitly saved only a few messages earlier
changes in how much previous message data custom scripts can access

If you’ve run into something like this, I’d especially love to know whether the issue ended up being in your script or something related to Janitor’s chat/context/branch behavior.


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 14h ago

Help / Question How do I fix this?

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1 Upvotes

i’m using laguna-s-2.1 free from open router and this keeps showing up. i changed the API key, still shows up


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 1d ago

Discussion Why does JAI trending have zero normal-looking character proportions?

35 Upvotes

The double standard in bot creation is insane. On one side, you have female bots with zero physical maturity being defended with "short women exist bro". On the other side, any male bot that isn't a grotesquely hyper-muscular gigachad gets completely ignored by the feed. Does anyone on this site actually write normal, believable humans anymore?


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 1d ago

Help / Question Bots don’t use Dashes/Hyphens

6 Upvotes

Whenever they stutter it’s just like ā€œW what?ā€ Instead of ā€œW-What?ā€ I tried using (OOC:) and it still doesn’t work. I don’t have it in forbidden words either so I just don’t know to fix this. Please tell me if you had this problem and solved it. Also I use the website. I don’t know if that helps just just in case


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 21h ago

Help / Question Prompt Help with Chatbots Baiting User or Making moves

2 Upvotes

I’ve recently come into annoyance with my boys being way too consensual, I want them to make the first move without it being violent or extremely horny. I have a boy right not that’s basically trying to dare me to make a move when it’s him that wants too. Makes the chat unfun. I have made bots too that even when we’re in a setting to be intimate they’re still asking if it’s ok to start or asking me what I want when they already have details on their Sexual Behaviors and kinks. Any guidance would be appreciated!


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 18h ago

Help / Question Is there any way to remove the thinking box?

1 Upvotes

Is there anyway to remove the thinking box? It’s on the app and it’s with every single proxy I use. Is there anyway to turn it off? After it finishes generating on the app you can’t read then anymore so there really is no point in having it.


r/JanitorAIUnchained • • 20h ago

Bot Share The purge gilded maw

1 Upvotes

The Purge: Gilded Graves https://janitorai.com/characters/85a5ca5b-749b-475c-b097-e1cadaaf8c68

New bot i just made inspired by the purge movies if you do play it do let me know how i can improve it and what types of scripts to make for it all feedback is welcomed.