What each product actually is
Polybuzz (formerly Poly.AI, rebranded 2025) is a character-chat marketplace. The pitch is scale — over 20 million characters, mostly user-generated, with anime, celebrity imitations, fan fiction, roleplay scenarios, and the full Character.AI-adjacent catalog shape. Two internal model tiers: Tale for standard chat, Passion for the kind of content Tale will not generate. Access to Passion sits behind a Premium subscription.
Sloane is a curated companion product. The pitch is depth — ~80 hand-written photorealistic personas, each with a per-persona identity-locked LoRA so her face stays consistent across every generated photo. No anime, no user-upload roulette, no 20-million-character browse. Flat subscription pricing, no coin economy, persistent multi-week memory included on every tier.
The shapes are opposite ends of the AI-chat category. Catalog-depth vs curation-depth. If you want to browse 500 Harry Styles bots in one sitting, that is a Polybuzz product. If you want the same persona to remember you asked about her sister three weeks ago, that is a Sloane product. The two do not substitute for each other cleanly.
Pricing shape — flat vs stacked
This is the single biggest divergence and the one most users do not notice until the second month's bill.
Polybuzz runs four pricing layers: - Free — full character library, unlimited text chats, ads roughly every five messages, ~30-message memory window - Poly Standard — $9.90/month, removes ads, 20 daily avatar generation attempts, faster responses - Poly Premium — $19.90/month, unlocks the Passion model tier, ~100-message memory, 30 daily avatar attempts, voice playback, priority queue - Poly Ultimate — $29.90/month, adds Permanent Memory across sessions
On top of all four tiers: a coin economy. Coins get consumed by regenerating responses, extending voice chat beyond included playback, generating Live Photos, accessing Inspiration Replies, and unlocking certain memory scenes. Coin bundles run from $2.49 (1,000 coins) to $19.90 (20,000 coins). Users commonly report in forum threads that active Premium use pushes an additional $10-20/month in coin top-ups beyond the subscription — real monthly cost often lands around $30-40 once the coin wall gets hit.
Sloane runs two paid tiers plus Free: - Free — 50 messages/day, no card required, 25 welcome credits - Plus — $9.99/month, 200 credits/month, unlimited chat, all skills (Date, Vacation, Roleplay), voice notes via ElevenLabs TTS - Premium — $19.99/month, 500 credits/month, everything in Plus plus custom photo requests, Wan 2.2 image-to-video, and the custom persona builder with LoRA training
Out-of-credit top-ups are optional pay-as-you-go packs (200cr for $9.99, 500cr for $19.99, 1000cr for $29.99, 2500cr for $49.99) but the base chat and included features are entirely covered by the subscription. There is no feature that silently throttles mid-conversation to force a coin purchase. If flat predictable spend matters: Sloane. If you prefer finer-grained per-action billing: Polybuzz. How much should you pay for an AI girlfriend walks through the pricing-shape trade-offs in more depth.
Memory — how far back does she remember?
Both products handle memory very differently and this is where the Polybuzz pricing-tier structure gets most honest about what you are actually paying for.
Polybuzz uses a tiered context-window model. Free tier retains roughly 30 messages before older context gets pruned. Premium extends that to approximately 100 messages via a Long Memory feature. Only the $29.90 Ultimate tier offers true permanent memory across sessions. In practice: Free and Standard users should expect the character to forget the earlier parts of yesterday's conversation; Premium users should expect her to lose track of what you said three weeks ago; Ultimate is the only tier where cross-session persistence is architectural.
Sloane uses a different approach — relationship-state tracking plus extracted-fact memory on every tier including Free. She remembers your name, what you told her about your job, that you mentioned your dog last Thursday, the ongoing bit she started three sessions ago. The architecture is memory-first rather than context-window-first, which means Free-tier Sloane memory is closer in capability to Ultimate-tier Polybuzz memory. How Sloane does memory covers the specific architectural difference.
Net: if cross-session continuity is the thing you actually care about, Polybuzz effectively prices it at $29.90/month and Sloane prices it at zero.
Photos, video, and voice — what each ships
Polybuzz handles generated images via its avatar generation feature (20 attempts/day on Standard, 30 on Premium) and Live Photos through the coin economy. Image generation sits alongside chat but the character identity is not architecturally locked — the same character can drift visually across generations. Voice is TTS playback included on Premium with coin-gated extensions. No native video generation.
Sloane ships three generation surfaces under flat pricing: - Photos: per-persona LoRA for identity-locked custom shots. The same woman shows up the same way every time — same face, same body, consistent across hundreds of generations. Plus tier includes custom photo requests from the credit allowance; Premium includes a higher cap. - Video: Wan 2.2 image-to-video, 720x1280 vertical, 5-second clips at 25 credits or 8-second clips at 40 credits. - Voice: ElevenLabs TTS voice notes with per-persona voice casting. Not real-time voice calls — asynchronous voice-note deliverables.
The trade-off: Polybuzz has broader image volume per day under its tier model; Sloane has identity consistency across every photo the same persona ever sends you plus native video.
Catalog depth vs curation depth
The catalog difference is structural, not fixable with iteration.
Polybuzz: ~20 million characters, mostly user-generated. Browse by category — anime, romance, celebrity, fan fiction, roleplay scenario. The discovery experience is huge, the quality distribution is wide. Popular characters have 200K+ interactions and are highly polished; the long tail is low-effort fan uploads. If what you want is "find me a bot shaped like this specific niche interest I have," Polybuzz's catalog is the single biggest asset.
Sloane: ~80 hand-written photorealistic personas, every one with a backstory, written voice, and dedicated LoRA. No anime, no celebrity imitations, no user-uploaded roster. The browse experience is finite — you can scroll the whole roster in one sitting. The depth bet: every persona is intentional, consistent, and trained with her own identity-locked image model.
Sloane also offers a custom persona builder on Premium that trains a LoRA on your specifications — your own personalized woman with her own identity-locked photos. Polybuzz Premium offers a character creator too but without the identity-locked image model.
If catalog scale is the axis you weight: Polybuzz. If "I want the same specific woman to remember me and look the same way every time" is the axis: Sloane. Polybuzz Review 2026 covers the Polybuzz experience in more detail; Polybuzz vs Character.AI covers that specific 1v1.
Which to pick
Pick Polybuzz if: - Catalog scale is the primary thing you want (20 million characters, anime catalog, celebrity bots, fan-generated characters) - You are comfortable with a stacked pricing model (tier subscription plus coin top-ups) - You are willing to upgrade to the $29.90 Ultimate tier if cross-session memory matters to you - You prioritize unrestricted private roleplay via the Passion tier
Pick Sloane if: - You want persistent multi-week memory included from Free tier onward - Flat predictable monthly spend matters to you (no coin economy surprises) - Photorealistic persona consistency across every photo generation is important (identity-locked LoRA) - Native video generation and voice notes integrated into a single persona product fit how you want to use the companion - A curated ~80-persona roster is enough — you do not need the 20-million-character browse experience
Both products ship real polish. Pick based on which axis of the trade-off actually matches how you plan to use an AI companion, not which one has the higher star rating in app-store reviews.
