Best API for Janitor AI: Free vs Paid Options Compared

From our experience, most people asking this aren't shopping for an API.

They're here because something broke. Either the model got worse, started refusing things, or began writing like a customer service rep.

So the useful answer isn't a ranking. It's understanding which of three problems you have(cost, content filters, or memory), and pointing you to right solution for your use case.

What API should I use for Janitor AI?

Here's the short version, then the detail.

Most people end up on a proxy. Not because the native options are bad, but because Janitor only has built-in slots for OpenAI and Claude, and those two filter the hardest.

Is there a free API for Janitor AI, and what does it cost you?

Yes, four routes, and one needs no key at all. Each one is free in a different way, and each charges you somewhere else.

JanitorLLM is built in. No key, no signup, no cost, and it's where almost everyone starts. You pay in context and availability. At around 9k tokens it forgets the early parts of a long scene, it's still beta, and it queues when the site is busy. Most people stay until the replies start repeating, then go looking for something else.

Google Gemini gives you roughly 250 messages a day from AI Studio, the most generous allowance going, with an enormous context window. You pay in refusals. It's filtered, and roleplay is exactly where that shows up.

OpenRouter rotates a set of zero-cost models like Nemotron and Step 3.5 Flash. You pay in rate limits. Free tiers are shared, so busy hours mean failed replies and retries, and the rotation means the model you settled on can disappear.

Community reverse proxies need no key and no signup at all. You pay in exposure. Somebody is covering those tokens out of their own pocket, and your messages route through their machine on the way to the model. Write nothing there you would mind being read.

Running it locally with KoboldCpp costs nothing per message and nobody sees your chats. You pay in hardware and setup time.

Free tiers change constantly. Nebula Block's free models, including DeepSeek, moved to a different platform in October 2026. Treat any free offer as temporary.

There's a pattern worth noticing. Every free option has someone paying the bill, and what you give up is whatever that payer is economising on: context, speed, a filter they can't afford to remove, or your prompt data.

Free earns its place while you're still working out what you want. Once a roleplay matters to you, the limits stop being an inconvenience and start being the thing you're fighting. And what pushes people off free is almost never the price.

Which AI is the best for Janitor AI?

Different question from which provider, and worth separating. Once you have a key, the model you pick matters more than where you bought it.

DeepSeek is the consensus pick, and has been for a while. It writes expressive dialogue, stays in character, and costs almost nothing. Both of Google's AI answers lead with it. There's a reason it's the default.

Claude writes the most coherent long scenes. It holds a plot together better than anything else. It also filters hard, and the community's workaround is assistant prefill.

Grok has fewer content boundaries than Claude or GPT and writes with real personality. It's the usual recommendation for NSFW roleplay, and it handles long lorebooks without losing the thread.

GLM and other uncensored open models skip the filter question entirely. Nothing to jailbreak, because there's no filter. Roleplay-tuned models like Midnight and Stheno sit here too, trained on fiction rather than assistant transcripts.

OpenAI is consistent and well-behaved, which is exactly the complaint about it. "kind of soulless" and "so much unnecessary fluff" is how roleplay users describe it, and that comes up more than any other objection.

What about settings?

Worth saying before you spend money: a lot of "this model is bad" is actually settings.

• Temperature 0.9 to 1.1 for creative, varied prose. Drop to around 0.7 if replies get incoherent
• Max new tokens 300 to 500. Enough for a descriptive scene without burning tokens on essays
• Context size as high as your provider allows

The top-voted answer in the biggest "which API is better" thread on r/JanitorAI_Official isn't a provider at all. It's temperature settings and chat memory.

What does each option actually cost?

Everyone in this category says "cheap" and nobody gives numbers. Here are real ones, per million tokens, which is roughly 750,000 words.

A message plus its reply runs roughly 1,000 to 2,000 tokens, once the character card and history are counted. On DeepSeek V4 Flash that's a fraction of a cent.

Put differently: $1 of credit buys you thousands of messages on a budget model. The "I'm not paying to talk to fictional characters" objection is real, but the actual number is usually under a dollar a month.

What about Janitor+ Router?

Since July 2026 Janitor runs its own aggregator. The janitor+ Router gives you around 70 third-party models, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, Grok and GLM among them, inside Janitor with no proxy and no API key. It's the easiest setup on this page, because there isn't one.

Two things to know before you pick it. It's web only and subscriber only, so the $12.99 a month is a gate rather than a bundle. And the subscription doesn't include the tokens: Router usage is billed per token from a separate wallet on top of it.

Subscribers get $5 in launch credits and 10% off some models. The credits expire a year after you claim them, and Janitor's terms say Router credits are "non-refundable except where required by law".

Which provider gives you the most models?

This is where gateways come in. Instead of a key per company, one key reaches everything.

OpenRouter is the best known, and deserves it. It's been this community's default recommendation for years.

NanoGPT gives you every model on this page with one key

That includes the ones recommended most. DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.14 and $0.28. GLM 5.3 Flash Uncensored. Grok, Claude, and Stheno if you want a model tuned specifically for roleplay.

Three things that matter for Janitor specifically:

You can start with $0.10. Crypto minimum is ten cents, card is $1. Every other gateway wants $5 or $10 up front. That's a real barrier when you're not sure you'll stick with it.

Uncensored models are first-class. GLM 5.3 Flash Uncensored and the other uncensored options are listed, documented and priced like everything else.

No markup. Text models are charged at the provider's exact list price. The $0.14 above is what DeepSeek charges, not a marked-up version of it.

Can you use NanoGPT without an account?

Yes. The API works without one, so there's no email, no signup, and nothing tied to your identity.

Is it safe to use a proxy on Janitor AI?

Janitor itself puts a warning next to the proxy settings:

"Janitor has no affiliation with any proxies. Your IP and chat log might be logged. Please ensure you trust the proxy."

That's accurate, and worth taking seriously. A proxy sees every message you send. The question isn't whether you trust Janitor. It's whether you trust whoever runs the endpoint.

Community reverse proxies are the ones to think about hardest. Many are run anonymously, for free, with no stated policy on what they keep. Free and anonymous aren't the same thing.

Some providers compete directly on this. AnonRouter runs prompts inside a hardware enclave and logs nothing at all, which is a stronger technical claim than most policies.

What to check before pasting a key anywhere:

• Is there a published policy on prompt retention?
• Is the operator identifiable?
• Does it require an account tied to your email?

NanoGPT doesn't log or retain prompts, and you can use it without an account at all.

Setting it up

Whichever provider you pick, the mechanics are the same. In Janitor: open a chat, hamburger menu top right, Settings, then set Provider to Proxy and click + New.

Two things catch everyone. The URL needs the full /chat/completions on the end. And you have to refresh the page after saving, which Janitor flags in a note right there in the panel.

For NanoGPT the URL is https://api.nano-gpt.com/api/v1/chat/completions, and there's a full setup guide in the docs.

So which should you pick?

Just starting, and not sure you'll stick with it: JanitorLLM. Free, no setup, no decision to make. You'll know within a week whether its limits bother you.

Everything after that: NanoGPT. One key, and the four things that send people looking in the first place stop being problems.

Refusals. GLM 5.3 Flash Uncensored at $0.20 in and $0.80 out, with no filter to jailbreak and no prefill tricks to learn.

Cost. DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.14 and $0.28, the model this community already runs, charged at list price with nothing added on top. Ten cents gets you started, against $10 at most gateways.

Memory. A million tokens of context on both, so a long roleplay stops forgetting how it began.

Changing your mind. Switching from DeepSeek to Grok to Claude to Stheno is a copy and paste in the Model field. No second signup, no second key, no second deposit.

Janitor's own Router does that job too, and it's the easier setup of the two. The difference is the bill: it wants $12.99 a month before your first message, and the tokens are extra. Here you pay for tokens and nothing else.

And nothing is logged or retained, with no account required to use the API at all.

One last thing. Most people assume the expensive option writes better. For roleplay it usually doesn't. DeepSeek costs a fortieth of Claude, and the community prefers it for most scenes, which is the whole reason paying per token beats paying per month here.