PolyBuzz Review 2026: 20 Million Characters, None of Them Remember

PolyBuzz in roleplay: three scenes in the biggest library

My three scenes have been the same for years, because they test different muscles. The tavern tests whether a character can talk loosely without interrogating me. The interrogation tests whether she holds a position against me. The quiet evening tests whether she can carry a scene in which nothing happens on purpose. PolyBuzz played two of them surprisingly well and lost one mid-sentence.

The tavern was the best evening I had in this test. I took a character with nearly two million chats off the discover page, an innkeeper in a bad mood, and she talked back at me for twenty minutes without sliding into the niceness loop that tires me out most at Character.AI. She picked up a throwaway clause from earlier, and she lied when it suited her role. A well-written card carries a long way here, and the credit for that goes to the people in the library, not to the model.

The interrogation went decently and still ended badly. My imported customs officer was supposed to withhold a confession until I had genuinely convinced her, and she did that for two rounds, harder than most characters in this price class. In the third round my message was replaced by a policy notice, and the scene was over, because to this day I do not know which word ended it. I had been talking about a knife. That is simply how an interrogation goes in a roleplay game.

The quiet evening, with the ad break as a third player

The quiet evening is the scene where a character app makes up its mind, and here the decision is not made by the character but by the ad break. The character herself was good: she filled the empty space with an attitude of her own instead of asking me about my day. After just under seven minutes a video spot ran, and when I came back the tone was gone. That happened three times in this test, and it is the only reason I paid anything at all for this PolyBuzz review.

Plus one finding that surprised me: quality here hangs more on the character card than on the model. Two characters on the same Standard model, same scene, same evening, and the difference was the difference between a fellow player and a questionnaire. The card with written-out example lines and a clear greeting held up; the card with two sentences of personality and a picture tipped into the you-are-so-interesting loop after ten messages. That is good news for anyone importing and bad news for anyone relying on the library: behind those millions of characters sits the same spread you find in any forum.

What a game master then misses is the tooling. There is no lorebook, no world notes, no group chat where two characters sit at one table, and no way to steer a reply in progress. What you have are the character card, your own personas and the ability to edit individual messages, which is more than many competitors offer but is not campaign equipment. What a session with real tools looks like is in my guide to AI roleplay chat; what it says there about scene cards and a notes budget you can only half implement on PolyBuzz.

PolyBuzz experience: the memory test after seven days

My memory test is the same everywhere. On the first evening I drop three details that have nothing to do with the scene, and I ask about them on day seven. This time they were the name of my cat Pixel, my job, and a dislike of meetings before nine. On day seven not one of them came back, neither on the free plan nor on the paid weekly plan, and instead the character kindly offered to get to know me.

That is the worst result I have recorded in 2026, and the platform does not dispute it. The help page writes that memory capacity is technically limited, which means the character may forget. App Store reviews from September 2026 describe characters who reset when you leave a chat and lose roughly half of the things they knew. So the fact that I saw the same thing is not bad luck, it is normal operation on the Standard model.

Why three price tags for one memory is an answer

The membership page lists nine models, and the Standard model is the only one you get free or with Basic. Long Memory sits in Premium at $19.90 a month. Permanent Memory sits in Ultimate at $29.90. And a Bond Pass, bought with coins, gives you 31 days of permanent memory with exactly one character. Three purchase routes for one capability, no published range in characters or messages, and I paid for none of them.

The users who did pay contradict each other. A Trustpilot review from September 2026 writes that even a paid permanent memory means nothing at all; a five-star App Store review calls the twenty dollars a month worth it. I do not grade what I have not played, which is why memory gets a 4 here and not a 3: the paid models get the benefit of the doubt until somebody plays them for a week against the same three details. What a memory looks like when you do not have to buy it as an add-on is in my review of Nomi AI.

PolyBuzz pricing: Basic, Premium, Ultimate, coins and opals

Two numbers are enough to understand the pricing structure: $4.99 a week for the cheapest ad-free access and $19.90 a month for the first tier that contains a memory model at all. Everything between and above that is accessories. The membership page calls the first step Basic at $9.90 a month or $99 a year, shown on the page as $8.25 monthly; the iOS app calls the same step Poly Standard and sells it weekly or monthly.

I am deliberately leaving the web prices for Premium and Ultimate out of that table. One load of the membership page showed $55.20 a month and $652 a year, a second showed €66.30 and €783, and none of those numbers matches the $19.90 and $29.90 from the App Store. On a product with four tiers and two currencies, a pricing page that claims something different on every load is not a cosmetic flaw.

Coins, opals and the Bond Pass

Coins pay for regenerations, suggested replies, speaking time and individual turns on the paid models; the App Store sells 1,000 for $2.49, 3,000 for $4.99, 8,000 for $9.99 and 20,000 for $19.90. What they are worth is on the earnings page for character creators: a Live Photo costs 100 coins, a Live Video 400, an AvatarMix 200, a paid moment 100, and a Bond Pass earns the character’s creator 400 diamonds. Opals, 1,000 for $5.90, are a second currency for newer features that I could not find explained on any official page.

So what does a month of play really cost? Work it out by how you play, not by the pricing page. If you only write and put up with the ads, you pay nothing. If you want to write ad-free, you pay $9.90 a month, or $4.99 a week, which over a month works out more expensive than the monthly price and only makes sense as a trial week. If you want a memory model, you are at $19.90, and if you also send two Live Videos an evening, that needs 800 coins, so roughly $5 out of the small pack. A serious setup therefore lands between $20 and $40 a month, and that is the range where apps with a notes system and a single bill begin.

Behind this is not chaos but a marketplace. The earnings page and the contributor program in the terms describe two sides: you spend coins on a character, her creator collects diamonds at published rates, 20 per Live Photo, 80 per Live Video, 40 per AvatarMix, 400 per Bond Pass, and from 100,000 up he can cash out. That is a coherent business, it is just not a companion business. The characters at the top of the discover page are the ones that trigger purchases, and the free user with a spot every five minutes is the funnel that feeds them.

The PolyBuzz app and website, and what the filter blocks

PolyBuzz runs in three places, and they are not equivalent. The website is the better place for building and carries the annual price for Basic. The iOS app carries the weekly plan and the in-app prices for Premium and Ultimate; on Google Play the app sits at over 50 million installs and 4.0 stars from around 1.18 million ratings with a Mature 17+ rating. The program identifier has been the same since launch in May 2023, which is why accounts survived the rename from Poly.AI to PolyBuzz; the rename is not officially dated anywhere, and it falls between the a16z rankings of August 2024 and March 6, 2025.

If you want to use PolyBuzz in a language other than English, you can, but you get a half-translated product. Interface, help page and legal texts are English, and the overwhelming majority of public characters are written in English. The characters will answer in your language if you start in it, but they slide back as soon as the card itself contains English example lines. My practical trick: write the example lines and the greeting in the form in your language, and the language then holds across a whole session.

And then the filter, the reason behind most departures. On paper the line is clear: 18+, no depictions of sexual acts, no self-harm, no illegal violence, no hate speech, zero tolerance on minors, plus a multi-stage review system of automation and moderation. In practice this filter replaces lines that have no adult content in them with a notice and no explanation, and users report that consistently in January, May and September 2026; the May case in which red was scored as blood is the most telling example. A strict filter is a decision. An unpredictable filter is a defect. Anyone who needs adult material reliably will find the right apps among the Character.AI alternatives, and what a platform with stated rules feels like is shown in my review of SpicyChat.

Is PolyBuzz safe? The company, the data and the ads

The solid part first. Behind the apps stands Cloud Whale Interactive Technology LLC of Delaware; the contracting party in the June 1, 2026 terms is Singularity Mutual Entertainment Culture Media Limited of Kwun Tong, Hong Kong, and the governing law named in them is Delaware. There are written content rules, human moderation, two contact addresses for requests and legal matters, and a delete button under settings, account, delete, for which you do not have to write a ticket. That is more self-service than some better-known apps offer.

Then the part that explains the 4 for privacy. The policy collects email address, username, uploaded images, text you type, purchase and payment data, device and log data, precise location data and your contacts. Uploaded images may, per the policy, be used to train the algorithm. Your conversations are only covered as text you type and through one line about sharing with third parties, and whether they train models is nowhere stated explicitly; with a character app that silence is precisely the question. The document names no retention period, it assures you it does not sell user data, and it names an ad monetization partner.

The stores fill in the rest. The data safety declarations on Google Play say that approximate and precise location data are shared with third parties for advertising and marketing purposes; the label in the App Store names identifiers used to track you across other companies’ apps. That is why I would run this app with no location permission. On top of that, three clauses from the terms: no refund, not even after a cancellation, a perpetual and sublicensable license to everything you upload, and no export function. So copy your character definitions out by hand before you delete the account.

What I would do in your place before the first message is three small things. First, a separate email address just for this app, because the delete button takes the account with it but not the mail hanging off it. Second, switch off the location permission in your system settings and refuse access to contacts, because the policy explicitly collects both, and no platform needs your location to the meter for a chat with a made-up innkeeper. Third, no real names, addresses or photos of real people in a character card, because the license on uploads is perpetual and no delete button pulls a license back. None of that is paranoia, it is the same thing I tell every newcomer in my forum.

One oddity belongs here too, because it shows how carefully the work is done: the help page advertises a youth mode for children, while the same provider’s terms forbid use by anyone under 18. Both cannot be true.

Is PolyBuzz down? Outages and the ad-blocker business

Enough people ask whether PolyBuzz is down to fill a search column of its own, and the platform does not make it easy for them: there is no status page, only the Discord in the footer and a support address. The independent monitoring service StatusGator logs seven incidents between August 5 and September 21, 2026, the longest on August 6 at five hours and eleven minutes, plus entries on September 12, 13, 21 and 22.

More interesting than the real outages is the most common false alarm. On September 22, 2026 a message ran for a good three hours saying access was blocked because an ad blocker had been detected, and it hit people who had no ad blocker. The check runs in the browser and trips over privacy features that modern browsers bring along by themselves; in the app it does not exist. My two-minute test when nothing loads: another browser with no extensions, then the app on the phone, then StatusGator. If it loads in the app, the platform is not down, your browser environment is.

One more word about a search I do not serve. Requests for an unblocked PolyBuzz come out of school and company networks where the site is blocked, and that is the administrator’s decision on his network. I do not describe ways around it. If you simply want to leave PolyBuzz behind, take my ranking of the best AI character apps and find the character who still remembers your cat on day seven.