Figgs AI alternative: the best Figgs AI alternatives now that Figgs AI is down for good

What happened to Figgs AI?

Figgs AI was a character chat platform that described itself, in the meta description on its own homepage, as "a platform for creating and sharing chatbots". You built characters, published them for other people to use, and chatted with them for free. That free part is relevant to how the story ended.

The decline was not sudden. Community write-ups agree on the outline: in May 2024 the developers indicated they were moving on to a new project and said outstanding bugs would be fixed soon, and those fixes did not arrive. Through the second half of 2024 the platform ran with no visible maintenance. In mid-December 2024 logins began failing and chats stopped saving, and by the end of that month the site no longer worked at all. December 30, 2024 is the date community accounts settle on.

Claims then circulated on the platform subreddit that user passwords and personal information had been exposed. A developer replied publicly, disputed that any data had been stolen, and attributed the disruption to what one account quotes as "a cyber attack or something". No evidence was offered either way, and no independent confirmation of a breach has surfaced since. We are reporting that this claim existed and was denied, not that a breach happened, and you should treat anyone who states it as established fact with some suspicion.

One thing worth flagging because the sources genuinely conflict: some write-ups say the team gave users advance notice and a window to export their characters and chats, while others say the site simply stopped with no statement at all. We could not find a primary announcement supporting either version. Given that the final archived capture contains no notice of any kind, the quiet version looks more likely, but we are not going to print a conclusion we cannot evidence.

Can I get my Figgs AI characters or chats back?

If they only ever existed on Figgs servers, no. There is no login to recover, no support address that reaches anyone, and no export tool, because all of those things live on infrastructure that is switched off. Nobody outside the original team has access to that database, and no third-party service can retrieve it for you regardless of what it advertises.

There is one partial exception worth trying. The Internet Archive holds captures of Figgs pages from when the site was working. If a character you made had a public page and a crawler happened to visit it, the description text may still be readable there. Search the archive for the specific page URL rather than the homepage, because the homepage was a JavaScript shell that archived as an empty page. This will not recover chat history and it will not recover anything private, but character descriptions are often the part people most want back.

The wider lesson is the one people take away from every platform that disappears: a character you spent months developing is a document, and it should live somewhere you control. Whatever you move to next, copy your character definitions into a note on your own device. Any product can shut down, and free products with no revenue can do it fastest, because nothing about them is anyone paid obligation.

What to look for in a Figgs AI alternative

Start with whether the thing has a business model. Figgs was free, which felt like a benefit right up to the moment it was the reason nothing got fixed. Servers and model inference cost real money every single day, and a service with no income is running on somebody goodwill until that runs out. A published price is not a guarantee of permanence, but it is the difference between a company that has a reason to keep the lights on and a hobby project that can be abandoned quietly.

Check the content policy before you invest time in characters, and check that it is written down. A platform that is vague about what it allows can tighten the rules overnight, and people who lived through Replika removing romantic roleplay from existing accounts in 2023 know what that feels like. Clear published limits are more useful than generous unpublished ones.

Then check whether you can get your data out. Export matters for exactly the reason this page exists. If there is no export function, every conversation you have is hostage to that company continuing to exist and continuing to like you as a customer.

Finally, be honest with yourself about how much setup you enjoy. The options in this space split cleanly into hosted products where you pay a monthly fee and everything works in a browser, and self-hosted software where you supply the model and get far more control in exchange for real technical work. Both are legitimate. Picking the wrong one for your temperament is the most common way people end up unhappy with an otherwise good tool.

Where other options beat us

If what you loved about Figgs was building and sharing characters with a community, we are not a like-for-like replacement and we will not pretend otherwise. Depravity ships a small set of personas built in-house for conversational depth rather than a public library you contribute to. Platforms built around user-generated character catalogues serve that specific itch better, and if browsing thousands of other people creations was the point for you, that is where to look.

If you want maximum control and total privacy, SillyTavern is the honest recommendation. It is free, open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, and its own documentation is clear that it is "only an interface, you will need access to an LLM backend to provide inference". Run a model on your own hardware and no conversation ever leaves your machine, which is a stronger privacy position than any hosted product including ours. The catch is that the project recommends a 3000-series NVIDIA card with at least 6GB of VRAM for local inference, it installs on Android only through a terminal emulator, and iOS is not on its supported platform list at all.

If price is the binding constraint and you need something at no cost, we are not it. Depravity has no free plan. Free options exist in this category and some of them are decent, though it is worth noticing that the platform this page is about was free, and being free is part of why it is gone.

What we are good at is the specific case where you want uncensored conversation that works in a browser on any device, with memory that persists, a price you can see before you sign up, and a company with an actual reason to still be here next year. Plans start at $15 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly, with Unfiltered at $29 and Boundless at $59.

Is it safe to use a Figgs AI mirror or archive site?

Treat anything presenting itself as Figgs restored, a Figgs mirror or a Figgs archive login with real caution. The original service is off, its domain points at a null address, and nobody else has the user database. A site inviting you to sign in with your old Figgs credentials cannot verify them against anything, which means the most plausible reason to ask for them is to collect them.

This matters more than usual because of the password-reuse problem. If your Figgs password was also your email password, typing it into a lookalike site hands over the account that can reset everything else you own. If you reused that password anywhere, change it on those other accounts now, entirely independently of anything on this page.

Static archive copies of public character pages hosted by the Internet Archive are a different thing and are fine. Those are read-only snapshots with no login and nothing to submit. The distinction is simple: reading an archived page is safe, entering credentials into anything claiming to be Figgs is not.