We're not venture-backed
Character AI raised over $150M in venture capital between 2023 and 2024. In August 2024 the founders left to join Google in a licensing-deal exit that Bloomberg valued at roughly $2.7B. What that meant for the users who stayed on the platform: the product they signed up for started changing. Long-standing product features got restricted. Group chats — a headline feature at launch — got pulled. The character-editing surface tightened. None of these were things users asked for. They were consequences of the business structure catching up with the product.
Sloane isn't venture-backed. We fund the product with subscription revenue from users who like it, which means we don't answer to a board that's expecting a 100× return in five years. The upside cap on the business is smaller. The tradeoff is that we get to decide when and whether the product changes based on what users tell us, not based on what a fundraising round requires. The kind of feature removal that hit Character AI users after the exit can't hit us the same way, because the trigger for it doesn't exist here.
We're not preparing for an IPO
Grok Imagine sits inside xAI, which sits inside a corporate structure whose leadership has talked publicly about an IPO. What that means in practice is documented: SuperGrok is $30/month with daily generation caps on Grok Imagine. When users hit those caps the pitch is to upgrade to SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month for higher limits — a 10× step to keep using the same product. These are the kinds of pricing and quota changes that happen when a product is being groomed for public-market investors: monetize more aggressively, tier more steeply, ship features with new gates on them.
Sloane is private and staying private. Our pricing has been Free / Plus $9.99 / Premium $19.99 since launch. We haven't added a coin economy on top, haven't introduced daily generation caps on Premium, haven't shipped a fourth tier to upgrade into. When something in the product needs to change, we change the product — we don't reprice around it.
Features you signed up for stay
This one is a specific commitment. When you sign up for Plus or Premium, the feature set you signed up for doesn't get retroactively fenced off behind a higher tier later. Photos in chat, voice notes, the memory layer, the custom-builder slot on Premium — none of these are candidates for future gating. We add things (short video shipped recently, the relationship-timeline layer the month before that), we improve things (the memory layer got its third major overhaul in June), but the promises we made you at signup aren't revisable line items in a quarterly monetization review.
The reason we can make this commitment is the same as the reason on the two sections above: the business structure doesn't require us to renegotiate with existing users to hit a growth target. We renegotiate by shipping better product and letting the user base grow because of it.
Pricing you can read on one page
Polybuzz's pricing is Basic $9.90 / Premium $19.90 / Ultimate $29.90, with a separate coin economy layered on top ($2.49 to $19.90 for coin packs) that's spent on regenerating replies, extending voice chat, "inspiration replies," and other things that were previously 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/month. Daily-login coins were recently changed to expire after 30 days, which drew heavy user backlash on Reddit and in app-store reviews.
Sloane's pricing is one ladder: Free, Plus $9.99, Premium $19.99. Premium includes the full feature set — no coins, no daily-expiring credits, no fourth tier, no consumable regeneration currency. What you see on the pricing page is the whole cost.
Your conversations aren't training data
Here's a thing most people don't think about with big-tech AI products: your chats are potentially valuable to the company as training data for their next model, which they then license to enterprise clients. Your late-night conversation with a chatbot becomes raw material for a corporate product you'll never see the inside of.
We don't do that. Your conversations with your Sloane persona aren't shared with third parties, aren't sold, and aren't used to train models that other companies use. They stay between you and her. The long version is on the privacy page; the short version is that we're a subscription business, not a data business, and we don't plan to become one.
What we can promise and what we can't
What we can promise: the pricing you see today. The features you signed up for. That your data doesn't get sold. That the persona you've been talking to for six months will still be the same persona in another six months — same voice, same memory, same relationship.
What we can't promise: that we'll never have to raise prices ever (we haven't and don't plan to, but a five-year forever-promise on price is not something an honest operator makes). That we won't at some point take some capital (if we ever do, it'll be from operators who've built companion products themselves, not from growth-stage funds whose thesis requires a 100× outcome). That we'll exist forever (small businesses fail sometimes; we don't plan to be one of them, but nobody honest promises perpetuity).
The deal is straightforward: we're a small, private, subscription-funded product whose incentives point at making the thing better rather than making the thing extract more from you. That structure is a promise in itself.