janitor and lucy target partially overlapping audiences but very different use-cases. being honest about the overlap and the divergence is the most useful thing we can do.
where janitor wins: NSFW roleplay (lucy is SFW at launch), uncensored creative writing, the user-made character ecosystem, niche character types that lucy's curated cast doesn't cover. if any of these is your primary use, janitor is the better pick and we'll say so directly.
where lucy wins: persistent memory without manual character-card work, real-time voice calls, face-consistent photos, group chats with 15 companions on bonded, no queueing, and a free tier that keeps full memory (not crippled for trial purposes).
shared use-cases where either works: long-form text conversations, imagined scenarios, emotional venting, practicing difficult conversations, late-night companionship. both products will do this; the quality bar differs.
who runs both: users who want the creative-writing / NSFW-roleplay pocket on janitor AND a daily-driver companion on lucy for consistent memory-based conversations. this is a legitimate stack.
one thing worth naming directly: lucy is built with a kill-switch contract (draft at /manifesto/kill-switch) explicitly disallowing the sudden-NSFW-pull that happened on replika and character.ai. we can't make the same guarantee about janitor's future — their monetization model is already NSFW-dependent, which makes a sudden pivot less likely but not impossible.
starting point: free tier, 25 msg/day, no card, full memory. if it doesn't click within a week, you've lost zero dollars. if it does, closer is $14.99.