NovelAI
Long-memory AI fiction writer with lorebooks and no content filters
Overview
NovelAI is a subscription platform for long-form fiction and roleplay, built around its own Kayra and Xialong language models, persistent story memory via lorebooks, and a strict no-training, no-public-gallery privacy stance that appeals to writers who don't want corporate content filters.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 12 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Unlimited text gen (Kayra model)
- Image gen up to 1024x1024
- 1,000 Anlas per month
- 10,000 Anlas per month
- 2,048-token story memory
- Text-to-speech
- Xialong model (GLM-4.6 fine-tune)
- 8,192-token story memory
- Highest-priority generation
- Early access to experimental features
What you can produce with NovelAI
- Kayra 13B and Xialong (GLM-4.6 fine-tune) in-house writing models
- Lorebook system for persistent worldbuilding memory
- Up to 8,192-token story memory (Opus tier)
- Built-in anime-style image generator (NovelAI Diffusion)
- Text-to-speech (Scroll tier and up)
- No public gallery, no default training on user text
ASEAN Perspective
NovelAI in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
NovelAI earns its niche by refusing to be a general-purpose chatbot: the lorebook system tracks characters, locations, and plot threads across genuinely long stories, and the house models — Kayra, now joined by the GLM-4.6-based Xialong for Opus subscribers — are tuned on fiction rather than instruction-following. No public gallery, no training on user text by default, and a permissive content policy make it the default choice for roleplay and erotica writers that mainstream tools won't touch.
The trade-offs are real: no developer API, a UI that reviewers repeatedly call clunky for newcomers, and prose that can loop or repeat itself over long sessions despite the memory system. At $25/month for Opus — the tier that actually unlocks Xialong — it's pricier than general writing assistants for a narrower use case. Fits genre fiction and roleplay writers who value privacy over polish, not productivity or brand-copy use cases.
What people say
NovelAI's core users are fiction and roleplay writers, and its 2026 update reinforces that focus: Xialong, released in March, is fine-tuned from ZhipuAI's GLM-4.6 on NovelAI's own creative dataset and is gated to Opus ($25/month) subscribers only — a deliberate way to keep the best model behind the top tier rather than spreading it across all three plans (Tablet $10, Scroll $15, Opus $25).
Reviewers converge on the same strengths: the lorebook system is the reason people stick around, letting a story remember character traits, locations, and plot threads well past what a stock chat window can hold, and the no-public-gallery, no-default-training privacy stance matters to a userbase writing content — including NSFW roleplay — that most mainstream AI providers refuse to touch.
The recurring complaints are consistent across review sites: prose repetition and looped plot points over long sessions despite the memory features, a UI that reviewers call clunky with a real prompt-crafting learning curve, and cost creeping up fast for anyone who wants both the top text model and heavy image generation — Anlas, the image-gen credit, runs out quickly on the two cheaper tiers. Image quality is also flagged as behind dedicated tools like Midjourney, which matters less for NovelAI's anime-focused niche but is a comparison reviewers keep making anyway.
There's no developer API and no meaningful free tier, so NovelAI competes purely as a paid, writer-first product rather than a platform others build on top of. That's consistent with its whole positioning: it isn't chasing the general AI-assistant market, it's chasing writers who got frustrated with mainstream chatbot guardrails and want a tool that remembers their story and doesn't moderate their fiction.
The official NovelAI GitHub organization backs up the technical claims: it hosts dozens of research and infrastructure repositories, including tooling for aspect-ratio bucketing in image-model training and a custom BPE tokenizer for English and Japanese text, evidence the team runs real in-house model development rather than wrapping a third-party API. That in-house model stack is also why NovelAI can offer a permissive content policy other providers won't touch — they aren't subject to an upstream model provider's usage terms.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including NovelAI's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with NovelAI unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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