Chub AI subscription: what Mars costs, and what Chub AI pricing leaves out

How much is a Chub AI subscription?

Twenty dollars a month, for the one tier Chub sells. Its subscription page states it directly: "Mars is Chub's first subscriber tier, granting unlimited access for one person to our largest models, for $20 a month." Chub's developer documentation repeats the figure and adds that the subscription covers "unlimited messaging as well as total integration into the Chub ecosystem."

What you are buying is the removal of setup work rather than a pile of features. Chub sells the convenience in those words: "No managing keys and cards or setting up servers, everything is in one place, ready to go." If you subscribe, Chub connects its own models automatically. If you do not, you are expected to bring a key from somewhere else, and that is where the other bills come from.

One detail matters for anyone comparing this against a per-message product. Mars is flat. There is no credit wallet, no per-token meter and no consumable currency draining while you talk, which genuinely is better than several competitors in this category. The meter shows up only if you go the API-key route instead, because then you are paying a provider by the token.

If you want the wider picture of what this platform is and is not, our Chub AI alternative page sets the two products side by side, and is Chub AI safe covers what the site does with what you write.

Is Chub AI free?

Not in the way people usually mean. Chub's own answer to the question "Is there a free trial/option?" is one sentence: "One-time free trial credits amounting to a few dozen messages are sent out to new users regularly." A few dozen messages, once. That is a sample, not a free plan, and Chub is refreshingly blunt about it rather than dressing it up as a tier.

There is a second sense in which Chub is free, and it is the one that makes the platform popular. The site itself, the character library, the lorebooks and the creation tools do not cost anything. You can use all of that and never pay Chub a cent, provided you supply the intelligence yourself by connecting an outside model with your own API key.

So "free" on Chub means free of a Chub bill, not free of cost. Your OpenAI or Anthropic usage still lands on your card at the end of the month, and it is metered by the token rather than fixed, which means a heavy month of roleplay can quietly cost more than the $20 subscription would have. That is the trade almost nobody spells out before you pick a side.

Is there a Chub AI Mercury tier?

Not on any Chub page we could read. This comes up constantly in searches, and several review sites describe a second, cheaper tier called Mercury at about $5 a month with smaller models attached. We went looking for it on September 16, 2026 and the word Mercury does not appear on the Chub subscription page, in the Terms of Service, or anywhere in the developer documentation.

The subscription page argues against it existing in that form, too. It calls Mars "Chub's first subscriber tier", which is not how you describe the more expensive of two options. A cheaper tier may well have existed at some point, or may live behind a login we cannot see, but we are not going to print a price for something the vendor does not publish.

The same caution applies to a claim you will see repeated elsewhere: that Chub bills in mandatory four-month blocks, making the real charge $80 up front. Chub's own Terms of Service describe something different. They say that if you cancel "you will not be charged for your next month's subscription", which is the language of ordinary monthly billing. Check the charge on the checkout screen before you confirm it, and trust that over any roundup, including this one.

What does "unlimited" actually mean on Mars?

Chub defines it, which is more than most platforms do, and the definition is reasonable. "Unlimited for a single user, similar to Netflix. Concurrent requests from the same account will return a 429 error." In other words you cannot run several conversations in parallel from one subscription, and you cannot share the account around.

The enforcement language is specific about what would trip it: "Obvious key sharing (usage from tens of locations/devices, 24-hour usage beyond that explainable by a sleep disorder, et cetera) will result in restrictions on your usage." For one adult using it normally, that is not a constraint you will ever meet.

Here is the part worth knowing before you pay. The page closes that answer with a dated reassurance: "As of August 22nd, 2023, this has not been triggered by any subscriber." Read the date. The page asking for $20 a month in late 2026 is still reporting a fact from August 2023, and the developer documentation that describes the same subscription is stamped "Last updated 1 year ago". The prices are almost certainly current. The promises around them are old, and you are the one carrying that risk.

How do you cancel a Chub AI subscription, and can you get a refund?

Cancelling stops the following month rather than ending the current one. The Terms of Service put it this way: "If you decide to cancel your subscription then you will not be charged for your next month's subscription and your access to the Subscription-Based Services will be revoked at the end of the active period." You keep what you paid for until the period runs out, then access ends.

Refunds are discretionary, and the wording is unusually direct: "Chub does not offer refunds unless explicitly granted by the Company." There is no cooling-off window described, no partial-month credit and no self-service refund path. If you want your money back you are asking a person to agree, not exercising a right the terms give you.

One clause deserves more attention than it gets, because it applies to everything above. Chub reserves the right to "change or otherwise update these Terms at anytime and without notice", and states that "all changes made to these terms are retroactive and apply to any and all users, content and communications, overriding any previously agreed upon terms." The billing rules you agreed to are the rules until Chub decides otherwise, including backwards. That is legal and it is disclosed, and it is also the sort of thing worth reading before a card goes on file.

We run through the same questions for the other paid platforms in this market on our Janitor AI Plus price and PolyBuzz subscription cost write-ups, and our own terms are on the pricing page.

Do you still need an API key if you subscribe to Chub?

No, and that is the clearest argument for the subscription. Chub lists eight ways to connect a model, and Mars is the only one where subscribing means you are done. The documentation describes it as connecting "seamlessly and automatically" with no keys to manage and no servers to set up.

Every other route on that list is a second relationship with a second company. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter and NovelAI are each marked "(PAID)" in Chub's own docs, each needs its own account and key, and each bills you separately at its own rates. Running Kobold or Ooba locally avoids the invoice but not the cost, since Chub notes it is free only "if being hosted from your machine with the only limitations being hardware requirements", and otherwise "you can rent a GPU via Vast AI or other cloud computing services."

The eighth route is the one Chub tells you not to take, and the warning is worth quoting because it is the platform arguing against its own most popular free option. Reverse proxies, it says, "are created by unauthorized third parties who gain access to your data and IP address. They may enable logging, leak your information, and use stolen API keys which you have no control over." For an adult conversation you would not want logged by a stranger, that is the whole argument in two sentences.

Is a Chub AI subscription worth it?

It is worth it for a specific person: someone who wants to build and tinker. If you enjoy writing characters, layering lorebooks, tuning a system prompt and choosing which model answers, Chub gives you more control than almost anything else at this price, and $20 flat for unlimited messaging is a fair deal against paying a provider by the token.

It is poor value for the opposite person. If what you want is to open an app and talk, you will spend your first evening on connection settings, and the platform expects that of you. There is also no app to install. We searched both the Apple App Store and Google Play on September 16, 2026 and found no Chub client on either, so it is a browser product, and store-level subscription management and refund routes do not apply.

The honest summary is that Chub sells a workbench and prices it well, while the parts a buyer usually checks last, the refund policy, the age of the promises and the number of companies who end up with your card details, are the parts that vary most. If a workbench is what you want, the $20 is not the risk. The paperwork around it is.

Chub AI or Depravity: which should you pick?

Pick Chub if the assembly is the appeal. You want a character library, lorebooks, your own model choice, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint you can point another frontend at, and the option to run the whole thing on hardware you own. Nothing here replaces that, and we are not going to pretend it does.

Pick us if you want the conversation and none of the setup. You choose a companion and start talking in about ten seconds. There is no key to paste, no proxy to trust, no model to research and no second company on your statement. The plan is $15 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly, and you can cancel whenever you like without asking anyone to grant it.

On the things both of us put in writing, we land in similar places and we will say so. Chub is adults only at 18 and over, and so are we. Chub commits that private chats are never used to train a model, and our chats are never sold, never shared and never used to train advertising, stored encrypted, exportable and deletable on request, with automated and human review disclosed for enforcing the hard lines around minors, non-consent and anything illegal. Those lines do not move here, and on Chub they do not move either.

If you are still comparing platforms, start with the best uncensored AI options, or read the feature-level split on our Chub AI alternative page. For what unfiltered chat costs across this whole market, see uncensored AI chat and chatbot plans.