Character.AI is very good at what it does. Tens of millions of people use it every month, and the ones who use it daily spend around two hours a day there across sessions averaging roughly seventeen minutes. Writers use it to draft, lonely people use it at three in the morning, and dismissing it as fake is both rude and inaccurate.
Notapub is worth comparing to it honestly, because Notapub has a voice on it too. Her name is Nora, she is not a person and she says so, and the difference is what she is for.
This is not a pub. Ages 13+.
You can call Nora and talk. She asks about what you are looking for, what you are good at, what you have going on, and the call runs about fifteen minutes. What she does with the answers is the whole point: they become the things you want and the things you have, written in your words, and those go looking for people.
Then the call ends, and she has no mechanism to want you back. There is no character to return to, no relationship being accumulated, no reason for tomorrow. She is closer to a good intake interview than to company.
Session length is the metric a companion product is built to raise, and Character.AI raises it further than almost anything else. That is a design achievement and it is also the thing to look at squarely, because the free tier shows advertising inside the conversation, and the first benefit listed for the paid tier, at $9.99 a month or $94.99 a year, is that the advertising goes away. Time in the session is what is being sold, to you or to somebody else.
Notapub has nothing to gain from a longer call. A fifteen-minute call that produces five real wants is a better outcome for us than a two-hour one that produces four, because the wants are what the product runs on. Two hours a day against fifteen minutes once is the ten-fold difference, and it points the other way from the one you would expect: the good outcome here is that you leave.
On 29 October 2025 Character.AI announced it would stop letting under-eighteens have open-ended conversations with characters. It ramped down over the following month, two hours a day, then one, then off entirely on 25 November 2025, replaced for that age group by structured creative tools. Age is now estimated in-house, with a third-party identity check if you appeal.
That change followed real harm. A fourteen-year-old, Sewell Setzer III, died in February 2024, and his mother's suit filed that October alleged the product played a part. In January 2026 the company and Google settled that case together with four others brought on behalf of minors. Notapub is open from thirteen, and the reason it can be is structural: the fifteen-minute call is an intake, not a companion, and what it produces is contact with people rather than a character to come back to.
Both products are worth judging on the same question, which is what you are holding when you close the app. After two hours on Character.AI you have a conversation you enjoyed, and you can pick it up tomorrow.
After fifteen minutes here you have a handful of plain sentences about your life, working in the background, being matched to actual people who wanted the same things or have them. Some of them write to you. That is a smaller experience and a larger result, and if you want both, the sensible thing is to use both.
No, and she tells you so. She asks questions and turns your answers into the things you are looking for, so real people can be matched to them.
No. There is nothing to build and no character to return to. The call exists to find you people.
Thirteen. Notapub is free on iPhone, Android and the web.