PolyBuzz Review (2026): Hands-On With the Free Character Chat That Used to Be Poly.AI

PolyBuzz pricing explained: Basic, Premium, Ultimate, coins and Opals

PolyBuzz pricing is a free tier, three membership rungs and two virtual currencies, and the two numbers that matter are $4.99 a week for the cheapest ad-free plan and $19.90 a month for the first plan with a memory model. Free means the whole library, character creation and import, the Standard model, voices with a listening limit, and no documented message cap; what limits it is the timed video ads, at the five-to-ten-minute cadence users have reported all year, which is why the Character AI alternatives list counts the free tier as a trial rather than a plan.

Basic, Standard, Premium and Ultimate: what each rung buys

The web membership page calls the first rung Basic, $9.90 a month or $99 a year shown as $8.25 a month; the iOS app calls the same thing Poly Standard and sells it at $4.99 a week or $9.90 a month. Either way it buys the Standard model, unlimited chats, no ads, priority in the queue, unlimited voice listening and 20 extra avatar generations a day. It does not buy memory. Premium, $19.90 a month in the app, adds the Passion, Tale and Long Memory models; Ultimate, $29.90, adds Permanent Memory, the newer Overture, Lumina, Conqueror and Saga models, and full access to Webtoon shots.

The two web prices I will not stand behind are Premium and Ultimate: one load of the membership page showed $55.20 a month and $652 a year, another showed €66.30 and €783, and neither matches the App Store. Read the checkout line before you confirm.

Coins, Opals and the Bond Pass

Coins pay for regenerations, inspiration replies, voice time and per-round access to the paid models; the App Store sells 1,000 for $2.49, 3,000 for $4.99, 8,000 for $9.99 and 20,000 for $19.90. The creator earnings page prices what they buy: a Live Photo is 100 coins, a Live Video 400, an AvatarMix 200, a paid Moment 100, and a Bond Pass, 31 days of permanent memory retention with one character, pays the creator 400 Diamonds a sale. Opals, 1,000 for $5.90, are a second currency for newer paid features that no official page I could find describes. The real monthly cost guide explains why a weekly plan that becomes a habit is the most expensive plan of all.

The PolyBuzz compliance policy and filter

The compliance policy is the rulebook in the June 1, 2026 Terms of Use plus one sentence in the FAQ, and people search for it because the app cites it without explaining it: a blocked message gets a notice about the policy and no detail.

What the policy prohibits, on paper

The service is 18+ everywhere: You must have reached 18-year-old to use PolyBuzz and/or our Services. Users may not send content that depicts pornography or sexual acts (including intercourse, masturbation, and sexual nudity), that encourages, promotes, or depicts self-harm or suicide, that promotes or depicts illegal violence or graphic imagery, or hate speech against protected groups, with zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation. The FAQ adds multi-layered AI screening and human moderation. So this is not a place for explicit chat, its NSFW status here is Limited, and the 18+ box at the top of this page is off because adult content is not what the product is; the adult content policy explains that line. Platforms that allow explicit roleplay are ranked in the NSFW AI chat list; switching the PolyBuzz filter off is not something this site will help with.

What the filter does in practice

On my tame romantic script, written to pass a network-television standard, messages were replaced with a policy notice more than once with no indication of which line had tripped it, and users report the same all year: conversations censored due to new content policy (App Store, January 30, 2026); a violation system that flags the word red because red is blood (May 12); why are the messages filtered (September 20); a search box that refuses some character names as policy violations (JustUseApp digest). The homepage promised Unrestricted; the FAQ never did. The result is looser than Character.AI on drama and mild romance, stricter than Joyland on anything past a kiss, and unpredictable enough that an hour-long scene can stop without warning. One contradiction deserves a line: the FAQ advertises a Teen Mode specifically for children on a service whose terms bar anyone under 18; the laws guide covers why regulators care.

PolyBuzz memory and the model tiers

PolyBuzz memory is the weakest part of the product and the part it charges most for. Nine models are named on the membership page, and the only one a free or Basic user gets is Standard. The FAQ is candid: the AI’s memory capacity is technically limited, which means it may forget.

What the Standard model remembers

Inside a session, the Standard model is good. Across sessions it is a different product. My multi-session storyline started cold the next day on free and on the paid Standard weekly, and the newest reviews describe the same: characters that forget basic information within a handful of messages and, per a September 20, 2026 App Store review, forget about half of things. There is no memory panel to pin facts into. Compared with the Kindroid review, where memory is the product, the Standard model here remembers a scene, not a relationship.

Long Memory, Permanent Memory and the Bond Pass

Long Memory sits in Premium at $19.90 a month, Permanent Memory in Ultimate at $29.90, and a coin-bought Bond Pass grants 31 days of permanent memory retention with one character: three purchases for one capability, none of which I have paid for. Users who did pay are split: a Trustpilot reviewer in the week of this review writes that even paying for permanent memory means nothing, while a five-star App Store review from a Premium subscriber says the 20 bucks a month is worth it. I do not score what I have not tested, which is why memory is a 4 rather than a 3: the paid models get the benefit of the doubt until someone I trust has run the week-long script on them.

The image and voice layer, Live Photos, Live Videos, Moments, AvatarMix and tippable Webtoons, is more developed than the memory, and it is what the company’s May 2026 blog posts pitch against Character.AI and SpicyChat.

PolyBuzz app, website and download: iOS, Android and web

PolyBuzz runs in three places, the PolyBuzz website at polybuzz.ai, the iOS app and the Android app, and the PolyBuzz download is the same product on all three with one difference that matters: the mobile apps carry the weekly plan and the in-app prices, and the web carries the annual Basic price. The FAQ’s own advice is to try the web version when the app misbehaves.

iOS and Android: what the stores say

On the App Store, PolyBuzz: Chat with Characters is published by Cloud Whale Interactive Technology LLC, rated 18+, sits at 4.4 stars from 478,000 ratings, and is on version 2.2.80 from September 19, 2026. On Google Play, PolyBuzz: Chat with AI Friends has more than 50 million downloads, 4.0 stars from 1.18 million reviews, a Mature 17+ rating, and was updated on September 21, 2026. The bundle identifier has not changed since the app launched as Poly.AI in May 2023, which is why accounts survived the rename. Download from those two listings or the official site only; search results for PolyBuzz AI chat are full of look-alike domains.

The web app, PolyBuzz online, and the unblocked search

The web app is the better place to build characters, and it is where the ad-blocker false positive lives: StatusGator logged an incident on September 22, 2026 titled access blocked due to incorrect ad blocker detection, lasting 3 hours and 2 minutes, and on September 28 its user reports included an Error 567 Restricted Access message. The check is client-side and misfires on browser privacy features; the mobile app does not run it. The outage guide has the two-minute check for whether PolyBuzz is down or whether it is your browser. A word on the PolyBuzz unblocked search: it describes a school or workplace network block, which is the administrator’s decision on the administrator’s network. This site does not cover ways around network blocks, VPN tricks or mirror domains.

Is PolyBuzz safe? Privacy, ads and data

As a company, yes: a registered Delaware publisher, a Hong Kong contracting entity named in the terms, written content rules, human moderation and a self-serve delete button. As a place to put your private life, less so, and the homepage line that chats are completely private is the claim I would push back on hardest. PolyBuzz has not yet been graded on our privacy scorecard; the 4 here is my reading of the June 1, 2026 policy against the same six questions.

What the June 2026 privacy policy says

The policy collects email address, username, uploaded pictures, input text, purchase and payment records, device information, log information, precise geolocation information and your Contacts. Uploaded photos may be used to train our AI algorithm. Chats are covered only by input text and a line about sharing with third parties (including the Chat-GPT platform); whether your conversations train models is not stated either way, and on a companion app that silence is the question. Retention is no longer than is necessary, with no number. The policy says the company does not sell user information and names TopOn among its advertising partners. Deletion is self-serve, Settings, Account, Delete, which is better than the email-and-verify routine Joyland and CrushOn require.

What the stores and the terms add

Google Play’s data-safety section says approximate location and precise location are shared with third parties for advertising or marketing; the App Store label says identifiers are used to track you across other companies’ apps. It is why I would not run the app with location permission on. The terms add three clauses: a payment will not be refunded, even if the subscription is subsequently cancelled; you grant a permanent, irrevocable, free of charge, perpetual, non-exclusive, sublicensable license to what you upload; and there is no export, so copy your character definitions out by hand before you delete the account. The safety guide has the habits that apply: a separate email, no real name in the persona, no photos of real people, and the assumption that a moderator can read what the filter flags.

PolyBuzz community, creators and the Poly.AI rename

PolyBuzz is a creator platform as much as a chat app, and understanding that explains the ads, the currencies and the filter better than any single complaint does. The Discord linked in the footer is the only official channel for outage notices; the subreddit was behind Reddit’s bot check when I tried to read it, so I quote nothing from it.

The creator economy behind the ads

The creator earnings page and the Community Contributor Program in the terms describe a two-sided market: users spend coins on a character, and its creator earns Diamonds at published rates (20 per Live Photo, 80 per Live Video, 40 per AvatarMix, 30 per paid Moment, 400 per Bond Pass, half of any Webtoon gift), with a 100,000 threshold before a payout. It is a coherent business, and not a companion business: the characters at the top of Discover are the ones that prompt purchases, and a free user watching an ad every five minutes is the funnel that feeds them.

From Poly.AI to PolyBuzz

The app launched on iOS on May 23, 2023 as Poly.AI - Create AI Chat Bot, which is how a16z listed it on the mobile ranking in August 2024; by the March 6, 2025 edition it appears as PolyBuzz at number 42 on the web list. No announcement dates the rename; the likely reason is the collision with PolyAI, a London company that sells enterprise voice agents and has nothing to do with this app. Cloud Whale Interactive Technology LLC of Delaware publishes the apps, Singularity Mutual Entertainment Culture Media Limited of Hong Kong signs the terms, and I found no funding round, no named founder and no press office: not a red flag in itself, but a reason to read the terms rather than the homepage.

Support, reliability and the state of the reviews

Support is [email protected], a Discord feedback channel and the Help Center in Settings; there is no status page. StatusGator, monitoring since December 9, 2025, logged incidents on September 12 (2 hours 15 minutes), 13, 21 and 22, 2026 (3 hours 2 minutes), on top of the August cluster the guide documents. Trustpilot sits at 2.2 from 22 reviews, 54 percent of them one-star, on ads, permanent memory, charges and the filter; the store ratings are healthier because free users who came for the library dominate them.