SillyTavern alternative: what it costs to run, why Android needs Termux and iOS has no app

What is SillyTavern?

SillyTavern is, in its own words, "a locally installed user interface that allows you to interact with text generation LLMs, image generation engines, and TTS voice models". It is the control panel, not the brain. You run it on your own computer, point it at a model somewhere, and it gives you a far richer way to shape a conversation than any commercial chat product will.

That richness is the reason it has the community it has. Character cards let you define a personality in structured detail and carry it between tools. Lorebooks inject world information only when a keyword comes up, which is a smarter use of a limited context window than pasting everything into a prompt. Extensions add memory summarization, voice, image generation and more. Group chats put several characters in one scene. None of the mainstream products come close to that level of control, and the project gives it away under the AGPL-3.0 license.

It is also honest about who it is for. The documentation describes its audience as "power users" and "savvy AI hobbyists". That is not a warning label so much as an accurate description of the setup: you will make decisions about backends, models, context sizes and sampler settings before you have a conversation. Some people find that part genuinely enjoyable. If you are one of them, SillyTavern is the correct answer and no subscription replaces it.

How much does SillyTavern actually cost?

The software is free and always will be. The project states it is "a free and open-source project released under the AGPL-3.0 License" and that it "will always be free and open-sourced". Nobody is going to put it behind a subscription later.

The cost lands somewhere else, and it lands in one of two places. The first option is a hosted API: you sign up with a model provider, paste in a key, and pay per token for as long as you keep chatting. That bill is small when you are curious and grows in direct proportion to how much you use it, which is the opposite shape from a flat subscription. Long roleplay sessions with a large context window are the expensive case, because every message resends the history.

The second option is running the model on your own machine, which is free per message but not free to start. The project recommendation for local inference is "a 3000-series NVIDIA graphics card with at least 6GB of VRAM". If you already own that card, this is the best deal in the entire category and you should take it. If you do not, buying one to chat is a large one-time cost that no monthly comparison makes sense against.

There is a third cost that never shows up in the guides, which is your time. Installing it, keeping Node current, picking a backend, tuning samplers and fixing it when an update changes something are all real work. Whether that is a cost or a hobby depends entirely on you, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend a subscription is obviously better.

Is there a SillyTavern mobile app?

No. There is no official SillyTavern app on the App Store or Google Play, on either platform. The installation documentation lists Windows, Linux, Mac, Android via Termux, and Docker, and that is the complete list. What people mean by "SillyTavern on mobile" is almost always a browser on a phone pointed at a copy of SillyTavern running somewhere else, either on the phone itself through a terminal or on a home computer reachable over the network.

iOS is the harder case, because it has no Termux equivalent that can run a Node server the same way. The practical routes are to run SillyTavern on a computer at home and open it from your phone, which works but means that machine has to be on, or to use a third-party client app that connects to a backend. Those third-party apps are not built or endorsed by the project, so treat their privacy handling as an open question rather than assuming it inherits SillyTavern reputation.

This gap is worth understanding rather than resenting. It exists because SillyTavern is a self-hosted server, and phones are deliberately hostile to running servers. It is a consequence of the architecture that makes the software good, not an oversight. It is also, for a lot of people, the exact reason they end up looking for something else, which is why this page exists.

How do you run SillyTavern on Android?

Through Termux, a terminal emulator for Android. The documented path is to install Termux, install Node and the tools it needs inside that terminal, pull down SillyTavern, start it with a command, and then open the local address in your phone browser. It works, and people run it this way every day.

What the installation guides tend to underplay is what living with it is like. The server only runs while Termux is running, so backgrounding or closing the terminal ends the session. Android is aggressive about killing background processes to save battery, so it can stop without you asking. Updating means going back to the terminal. And if you are using a local model on the phone rather than a remote API, a phone is not the hardware the project recommends for inference.

One practical note the affiliate guides get wrong often enough to matter: the Termux build distributed through Google Play has been unmaintained for years, and the maintained one comes from F-Droid or GitHub. If a guide tells you to install Termux from the Play Store, that guide has not been checked recently, which is a reasonable signal about the rest of its contents.

Where SillyTavern beats us

On control, completely. Character cards, lorebooks, per-conversation sampler settings, extensions, group chats and the ability to swap the underlying model whenever you feel like it are all things we do not offer and are not trying to. If you want to tune the machinery, we are the wrong product.

On price at volume, if you own the hardware. A graphics card you already have plus free software beats any subscription, forever. We cannot compete with zero and will not pretend the maths says otherwise.

On privacy at the strongest setting. A model running on your own machine with no network call is more private than any hosted service can be, including this one. Our commitments are real, and they are still commitments from a company rather than a physical guarantee. That distinction matters and it deserves stating on our own comparison page.

On not being locked in. It is open source under AGPL-3.0. If the project changed direction tomorrow the code would still be there and someone would fork it. A subscription has no equivalent protection, and the honest version of that sentence is that you are trusting us to keep being worth paying for.

Who each one is for

Choose SillyTavern if you enjoy the setup, own a capable GPU or are comfortable managing an API bill, and want control over every part of how a conversation is constructed. It is free, it is genuinely excellent, and the people who love it are right to.

Choose Depravity if you want to open a browser on the phone in your pocket and start talking, with the model, the memory and the hosting already handled, at a price printed on the pricing page that does not change with how much you use it. No terminal, no API key, no card to buy, nothing to keep running at home. Uncensored conversation for US adults 18 and over, from $15 a month, with the same hard lines we state everywhere: nothing involving minors, nothing non-consensual, nothing illegal.