COMPARISON
Sloane vs
Polybuzz.
Polybuzz (formerly Poly.AI) has a twenty-million-character library, three subscription tiers, and a coin economy on top. Sloane has 80+ hand-curated women, a custom builder on Premium, and one clean pricing ladder that tops out at $19.99.
Updated September 12, 2026
TL;DR
- Polybuzz (formerly Poly.AI) runs Tale (standard) and Passion (mature) model tiers with a coin economy layered on subscription.
- Sloane runs one Premium tier at $19.99/mo with 500 credits included — no coin economy layered on top.
- Real Polybuzz complaint in 2026: coin-gating adds surprise costs above the base subscription; active users report real spend 3-5x the sticker price.
- Both platforms serve character-chat intent but with different shapes — Polybuzz sandbox model vs Sloane curated roster.
- Sloane's persistent per-persona memory + LoRA-locked photo identity are the differentiators over Polybuzz's stateless roleplay flow.
Meet Sandra
Skip the coin economy stacked on top of Polybuzz's subscription. Sandra's on Sloane's flat $9.99 Plus — no surprise costs, no Passion-tier gating. Free tier, no card.
AT A GLANCE
Quick comparison
80+ hand-curated personas vs twenty million strangers' uploads.
Polybuzz's headline number is "20 million characters" — and it's the same figure they've advertised since before the Poly.AI-to-Polybuzz rebrand in January. It hasn't visibly grown; it's a static marketing number. The characters themselves are user-uploaded — including JSON imports from Character AI, Pygmalion, and other platforms. Quality is whatever the original author wrote. The same character can read totally differently between two people because the system prompt is whatever someone else thought up at 2am.
Sloane has 80+ hand-curated personas. Each one was written by the operator with a full system prompt, a backstory, a voice, a vibe. When you talk to Claire, she's the Claire we wrote — not whatever a random uploader decided Claire should be that week.
A pricing ladder you can read on one page.
Polybuzz runs three subscription tiers ($9.90 Basic / $19.90 Premium / $29.90 Ultimate) and stacks a coin economy on top ($2.49 up to $19.90 per coin pack). Coins are spent on regenerating replies, extending voice chat, "inspiration replies," and other things that used to be baseline. Third-party reviews report that active Premium users spend an additional $10-20/month on coins on top of the subscription, putting the real cost closer to $40. A recent change made daily-login coins expire after 30 days — a quiet rollout post-rebrand that drew heavy backlash on Reddit and in app-store reviews. Google Play reviews from mid-2026 also cite ads showing up every four minutes on the free tier, each running two-plus minutes.
Sloane is one clear ladder: Free, Plus $9.99 (200 credits/mo), Premium $19.99 (500 credits/mo). Credits are used for photos (5 each), voice (5 each), and video (25 each) — the same credit pool across all three. Top-up packs are consistently priced ($9.99/200, $19.99/500, $29.99/1000, $49.99/2500), and monthly-allowance credits don't expire while your subscription is active. No fourth tier gated above Premium, no ad interstitials.
Visual identity that holds.
Polybuzz generates images via generic SDXL with character-specific prompts. Their own users report what we'd call face drift — the character looks meaningfully different from one photo to the next, sometimes within the same conversation. There's no per-character image model.
Sloane trains a LoRA per persona on a curated photo set. The result is visual consistency: Maya's face looks like Maya's face every time, in every shot. Identity is engineered, not emergent.
HONEST DIFFERENTIATION
When Polybuzz is the better choice
You want sheer character variety
Twenty million characters is twenty million characters. If browsing forever and trying a new persona every day is the appeal, that library breadth is Polybuzz's core.
You're anime/fandom-focused
A lot of the Polybuzz library is anime and fandom characters. If those specific IPs are what you're looking for, that's Polybuzz's gravitational center.
You want a free entry point
Polybuzz's free tier is more permissive on catalog access (with ads and frequent paywall prompts as the trade). If catalog-first free browsing is what you're after, that's their entry-point.
You want voice variety across characters
Polybuzz advertises 50+ TTS voices across many languages (third-party reviews put the practical usable count closer to 20 — mostly young/mature × male/female presets with tone blends, English phonemes even for non-English chats). If sheer voice-preset variety is what you want, Polybuzz has more presets to browse.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
Questions.
Is Sloane just a smaller Polybuzz?
No — different product. Polybuzz is a sandbox with millions of user uploads. Sloane is a hand-curated roster of 80+ women, plus the ability to design your own as a Premium member.
Why curated instead of a giant library?
Quality. Every persona is hand-written, has a trained image model, and ships with continuity built in. 80+ women you'd actually keep talking to beats twenty million you wouldn't.
Does Sloane have a free tier?
Yes. You can talk to the free-tier personas up to the daily message limit, no card required.
Why are Sloane's photos more consistent than Polybuzz's?
Per-persona LoRA training. Each Sloane persona has her own image model trained on a curated photo set, so the same face shows up in every shot. Polybuzz uses generic SDXL with character-specific prompts, which is why their users report face drift between gens.
Is Sloane cheaper?
At the top tier, yes — Sloane Premium ($19.99, with 500 credits/mo included) sits below Polybuzz Ultimate ($29.90 + coin economy). Sloane uses credits too (5 per photo, 5 per voice, 25 per 5-sec video / 40 per 8-sec video), but they're included in the subscription with consistent top-up pack pricing and no daily expiry. Once you factor in the $10-20/month third-party reviewers cite as typical coin spend for active Polybuzz Premium users, the effective gap widens.
Wait — Polybuzz used to be called Poly.AI. What changed?
The company (Cloud Whale Interactive Technology, Delaware) rebranded from Poly.AI to Polybuzz in January 2026. The catalog and app carried over. What's changed post-rebrand: the 30-day expiry on daily-login coins, sharper paywall gating (paid model tiers at Premium/Ultimate — Passion, Tale, Overture, Lumina, Conqueror, Saga), and the "Permanent Memory" carve-out to the top tier. Users on Reddit and app-store reviews consistently frame these as monetization tightening, not product improvement.
What does Polybuzz's memory actually look like in practice?
Community-estimated caps from r/polyai: roughly 20 messages of context on the free web version, ~30 on the free app, ~80 on Premium web, ~100 on Premium app. "Permanent memory" is advertised only on Ultimate ($29.90/mo). Older messages get pruned once the cap fills. Sloane's memory is persistent on every tier — the grounded facts and relationship state don't rotate out.
Are there billing issues with Polybuzz I should know about?
Third-party chargeback aggregators and r/polyai threads consistently flag recurring or "ghost" charges continuing after users believed they had cancelled, with support described as slow or unresponsive. Justuseapp reviews cite the same pattern. Sloane cancels in one click and honors it — the next billing period stops on the same click that triggered it, and support is a real human.
What's the "Take a Little Break" thing?
A modal ad interstitial documented on r/polyai (May 2026 thread) that appears roughly every 5 messages on the Polybuzz free tier, forcing users to either watch an ad or upgrade to keep talking. Sloane's free tier has no ad walls at all — you talk to her until you hit the daily message limit, then come back the next day.
YOUR MOVE
80+ hand-curated personas
beats twenty million half-baked uploads.
Hand-written personas. Photo identity that holds across shots. One clear pricing ladder — Free, Plus $9.99, Premium $19.99 — with credits included in the subscription.
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