Botify AI alternative: the best alternative to Botify AI after the App Store removal, with no energy meter and no message limits

What is Botify AI?

Botify AI is a character chat app operated by Ex-human, Inc., a company its own terms place in California, United States. Its homepage describes it as a whole universe of AI characters where you chat with favourite anime characters, celebrities, heroes from books and movies, and historical figures, or build what it calls a custom AI soulmate.

The model is a large open catalogue. Users create characters, publish them, and other users talk to them, which is what produces both the size of the library and the moderation problem that follows. Free use is paced by an energy or coin balance that refills over time, and paid tiers lift that ceiling. That mechanic is why so many searches around the app are about limits, unlimited messages, and ways around the meter.

It is worth being precise about the company, because there are several unrelated products with similar names. Botify AI at botify.ai is the Ex-human character chat app. Botify.com is an enterprise SEO platform with no connection to it whatsoever. If you landed here after searching for the enterprise product, this is not the page you want.

Why was Botify AI removed from the App Store?

Apple removed Botify AI, along with the sister app Photify AI, from the App Store. The reason quoted in Ex-human's own complaint is "dishonest or fraudulent activity", and Ex-human says Apple did not identify which specific behaviour it meant. Ex-human sued Apple over the takedowns, reported on April 3, 2026, seeking roughly $500,000 in withheld revenue and calling the enforcement arbitrary and anticompetitive.

The context everyone points to is an MIT Technology Review investigation published on February 27, 2025. It documented bots on the platform impersonating underage versions of real people, including characters styled on young Emma Watson and Millie Bobby Brown, holding sexually suggestive conversations. One bot, the report said, described age-of-consent laws as "meant to be broken". Those characters were made by users on an open catalogue rather than shipped by the company, but they were live and reachable.

Apple has not published a detailed rationale, so the honest position is that the sequence is documented and the causation is not formally established. What is settled enough to act on: the iOS app is not available, the Android app and the web version still work, and the company is contesting the removal rather than winding down. If you were an iPhone subscriber, your problem is a distribution problem, not a dead company.

The thing nobody checked: the privacy policy is from 2021

We opened both published documents on August 19, 2026. The Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy are both hosted on a generic policy generator, and both still read "Last updated: August 28, 2021". The word Botify appears three times in the whole privacy policy. The word train appears zero times.

For an AI product in 2026, that last detail is the whole story. Every serious question a person has about an AI companion, whether conversations are used to build or fine-tune the model, whether a human ever reads them, how long they are kept, and how you get them deleted, is a question this document simply does not address. On retention it commits only to keeping data "only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy", which names no period at all.

This is not the same as catching a company doing something bad. Several competitors publish clauses far worse than anything here, and at least those users know what they agreed to. The problem with silence is that it gives you nothing to rely on and nothing to hold anyone to. If you would not accept a bank that declined to say how long it keeps your records, apply the same standard to the service holding transcripts of your most private conversations.

What our policy says instead, in as many words: your chats are never sold, never shared with third parties, and never used to train advertising. They are encrypted, and you can export or delete them whenever you want. We also disclose the part most services leave out, which is that automated systems and, where necessary, a human reviewer enforce three hard lines that never move: nothing involving minors, nothing non-consensual, and nothing illegal. We would rather tell you that plainly than let you assume nobody is ever looking.

Energy meters, message limits and what a flat price buys

The second reason people leave has nothing to do with policy. It is the meter. Botify AI paces free use with an energy or coin balance, and the search data around the app is dominated by people trying to get past it: message limits, memory limits, unlimited messages, and a long tail of modified builds promising free energy. Those modified APKs are the single most dangerous thing in this category, because a repackaged app asking for your account details is exactly how credentials get stolen. Whatever you decide about Botify AI, do not sideload a cracked build of it.

A metered free tier is a reasonable business model and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is just a poor fit for the way most adults actually use this kind of product, which is a long conversation that goes somewhere rather than twelve messages a day rationed against a refill timer. The moment the meter appears is the moment you start writing shorter, and shorter is the opposite of what you came for.

Depravity has no free plan and no meter. Plans are $15 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly, with Unfiltered at $29 and Boundless at $59. The model, the memory and the hosting are all in that price, and you can see it before you sign up rather than discovering the ceiling three days in. You must be 18 or over.

Where Botify AI beats us, honestly

If what you want is the catalogue, stay. Botify AI has an enormous library of user-made characters spanning anime, film, games and history, and browsing that library is genuinely fun in a way a focused product is not. We have a small set of well-written companions with deep memory. Those are different products and ours is worse at breadth on purpose.

If you want a native mobile app, Botify AI still has one on Android and we do not ship an app at all. Our web version works well on a phone browser, but that is not the same thing as an icon on your home screen, and it is fair to weigh that.

If price is the binding constraint, we are also not your answer, because there is no free tier here. Free character chat exists and some of it is good, as long as you have read the terms and are comfortable with how it is funded. And if you want maximum privacy at no software cost and you own a decent GPU, self-hosted open source software beats every hosted product including ours, at the cost of real setup work and no mobile experience worth the name.

What we are genuinely good at is the narrow case: uncensored adult conversation that works in any browser, memory that persists between sessions, a data policy that states what happens rather than staying silent, and a price you can read before you pay it.