best janitor ai alternatives?
Everyone always asks for a list and then gets overwhelmed by 15 options. So singular pick - Chub Venus, with the OpenRouter or DeepSeek backend. That's it. Reasoning: it's the closest in spirit to what Janitor was when it was good (2023ish), the character library is massive and not as filtered, you bring your own model so you're not at the mercy of one company's moderation team, and the UI is actually maintained. The downside is you have to set up an API key which scares people off but it's genuinely a 5 minute task and DeepSeek is dirt cheap, like a few cents a month for normal use. I switched in October after Janitor's outages got truly unbearable and I haven't looked back. The OpenRouter angle also means when a new model drops you can swap to it the same day instead of waiting for the platform to maybe add it eventually. Anyone else made the jump? And what's your go-to model on it - I've been on the new DeepSeek R1 successor and it's genuinely good for RP.