The site people mean by "old c.ai" or "the beta site" no longer loads. Character.AI retired it on 24 September 2024, moved every account, Character and chat to character.ai and the mobile app, and wrote in its own help center that "the old website is no longer accessible." Any guide promising a working URL for the old site is pointing at a dead address. What follows covers what the beta site was, where your chats went, and the three changes since that actually matter if you liked the old version: the removal of open-ended chat for under-18s, the Free, Lite and c.ai+ tiers, and how memory now works. Everything here comes from Character.AI's own announcements and help pages, read on 17 September 2026.
My position, which you can argue with at the end: the interface is not what anybody misses.
YourCrush.AI is where this article ends up for anyone who wants the old c.ai feel with a memory count printed on the plan.
What was beta.character.ai, and can you still use old c.ai?
Beta Character AI lived at beta.character.ai, and users later called it old.character.ai or old c.ai. It was the first version of Character.AI's website, and it went dark on 24 September 2024 when the company moved every account, Character and chat over to character.ai and its iOS and Android apps. You cannot use it anymore. The help-center article dated 24 September 2024 says the old site was retired so the company could "allocate resources to focus on improvements" and "improve overall server stability," and it answers "Can I still access the old site?" with a flat no.
The word "beta" was a subdomain, not a separate product. The same models served both sites, and the company's September 2024 community update, published 27 September 2024, treats the migration as a UI move. It lists the requests it was hearing most, "Memory, Character Quality, Search, Recommendations, Accessibility, and UI/UI customizability," and promises the old look would be partly recreated on the new site. The retirement notice names what came back: a Chat Preferences setting with "Classic, Default, and Dense" layouts, a spinner while chats load, and a quick-navigation arrow. If what you miss about old c.ai is the dense, text-first chat screen, "Classic" under Chat Preferences is the official answer, and it costs nothing.
If what you miss is how the Characters replied, no setting brings that back. The rest of this article is about why.
Why YourCrush.AI is the better choice for anyone who misses old c.ai
YourCrush.AI states every memory limit as a number on its pricing page, which is the thing the rest of this article keeps having to translate out of "Basic, Better, Best." YourCrush.AI pins 10 memories on Free, 50 on Pro at $9.99 a month, and an unlimited number on Premium at $19.99 a month, and a pinned memory is a counted list entry you can read and edit rather than a chat message you selected. YourCrush.AI branches a story into separate timelines, 1 on Free, 5 on Pro and unlimited on Premium, so a "what if" scene does not overwrite the main thread, which is the closest thing to the duplicate-chats option Character.AI shipped after the beta retirement. YourCrush.AI meters the Free tier in chat tokens, 400K a month, rather than in a daily ration of the better model, so a long session on a good day is not cut off at a counter. And YourCrush.AI builds a character from the character creator with a backstory of up to 2,400 characters, three to seven traits from a list of 27, and an AI-assisted draft from a name and an image.
The named limitation: YourCrush.AI is 18+ only, so it is no answer for the under-18 users who lost open-ended chat on Character.AI in November 2025, and its explore library, split into Anime and Human categories, is a fraction of Character.AI's catalogue. What it is for is the adult who wants the memory spec in numbers before paying for it.
What happened to your chats and Characters from the old site?
Nothing was deleted. The retirement notice states that "all chats will be preserved and migrated," and if you had a chat older than six months that never showed up on the new site, you could pull it across by opening it in your history and clicking "Migrate chats." Characters you created moved with your account. The help center's creator answer, last edited 17 October 2024, still says creators "can never see the conversations that you have with their Characters."
Two later changes matter if you're digging up an old roleplay. The December 2025 community update raised chat history per Character from 100 conversations to 1,000, so chats that had scrolled off the bottom of the list came back into view. As for why a Character seems to forget things, the platform's own explanation, in a help article from 2 May 2023 that is still live, is that "there is a limited amount of conversation context that the character can consider." A migrated chat from 2023 is intact as text. The model reading it still only sees the recent window plus whatever you have pinned, which is what the memory section below covers.
What changed for under-18 users in November 2025?
Character.AI removed open-ended chat with Characters for users under 18. The change was announced on 29 October 2025 and finished no later than 25 November 2025. The company's announcement says teens keep "creating videos, stories, and streams with Characters" but lose the free-form chat itself. In the interim, their chat time was capped at two hours a day and "ramped down" until the cutoff. The teen-facing version of the notice, edited 29 October 2025, adds that past chats, images and videos stay saved. Under-18 accounts can still create Characters, scenes and voices, post on Feed, and use Imagine Chat and AvatarFX.
Open-ended chat for under-18 users was removed in November 2025, after a transition with a daily time limit.
The stated reason is regulators. The company says it had "received questions from regulators, about the content teens may encounter when chatting with AI and about how open-ended AI chat in general might affect teens, even when content controls work perfectly." Read that last clause twice. It concedes that the filter working as designed was not considered enough.
Age is decided by an in-house age assurance model plus the third-party verifier Persona. The age assurance explainer, published 31 October 2025, describes three steps:
Character.AI runs age assurance on every account using "login info, activity on the platform, and some signals from third parties." An account judged 18+ continues with no action.
An account judged under 18 gets the under-18 experience, or its owner can verify with a selfie through Persona. The explainer says C.AI "wouldn't collect or have access to" any ID.
Only if the selfie leaves Persona unsure is an ID requested. The explainer says Persona keeps IDs for one week.
On the beta site, age was a birthday you typed. Now the platform decides from behaviour and asks you to prove otherwise. The floor is still the one the subreddit's rules state: users must be 13 or older, 16 in the EU. For an adult, the practical effect is that an account with a young-looking usage pattern can be dropped into the restricted product until a selfie clears it.
What do Free, Lite and c.ai+ cost, and what does each one include?
Free is $0 with unlimited messages and full ads, Lite starts at $4.99 a month, and c.ai+ is $9.99 a month or $94.99 a year, all read from the App Store in-app purchase list and the c.ai+ page on 17 September 2026. The App Store listing, from Character Technologies, Inc., shows 4.3 stars across 557K ratings and an 18+ age rating, and lists "Character.AI+" at $9.99 and $94.99, "Character.AI Lite" items at $2.49 and $4.99, and six Charms packs from $0.99 to $49.99. The plus page prints the annual price as $119.88 struck through to $94.99.
Lite has no blog announcement that I could find. It exists in the C.ai Lite FAQ, created 4 September 2026, which describes it as "premium-model chats every day, fewer ads, and better memory" at a price below c.ai+, priced by region. The mechanism is a daily allowance: you get a counted number of messages on the premium chat styles (DeepSqueak and LongSqueak), and when they run out "your chat continues on the standard model" until the next day. The FAQ has an entry titled "Why did my chat switch models mid-conversation?" whose answer is that this is the allowance "working as designed." Lite also carries 30 memory pins, up from 15 on Free, and reduces ads without removing them.
c.ai+ is the tier with no meter. Per the plus page it has no ads, "Best" memory, 30 pins, the advanced Lorebook, the highest daily limits, no slow mode, and a 20% bonus on Charms purchases. The c.ai+ FAQ, edited 14 September 2026, still carries the original 2023 pitch of skipping the waiting room and "approx. 2-3x faster" generation, and it repeats that free messaging stays unlimited.
On Google Play the listing shows 50M+ downloads, a Teen content rating, "Contains ads," in-app items from $0.99 to $99.99, and a data safety label of "No data shared with third parties" with Personal info, App activity and two other types collected. The star average on the copy served to this machine on 17 September 2026 was 2.2 across 2.44M reviews; Play averages by storefront, so the figure you see may differ. The App Store privacy label is broader than Play's: it lists Location, Contact Info, Identifiers and Usage Data under "Data Used to Track You."
The comparison in one sentence: Free gives you the standard model with no cap, Lite gives you a daily ration of the better model for $4.99, and c.ai+ gives you the better model with no ration for $9.99, so the $5 between Lite and Plus buys the removal of a counter.
How does Character.AI memory work now, and how many pins do you get?
Memory on Character.AI is a rolling context window plus three things you can control: pinned messages (15 on Free, 30 on Lite and c.ai+), a Story Memory box, and, on c.ai+, an automatic Facts list and a Lorebook. The Pinned Memories help article, first published 30 March 2024, launched pins at 5 per chat for all users; the current plus page lists 15 and 30. A pinned message is text the model always sees, which is why pins are the one memory number on the site you can hold it to.
Memory is counted in pins on Character.AI: 15 on Free, 30 on the paid tiers.
The rest arrived on 21 May 2026 in a post titled Smarter Memory for Smarter Chats. Story Memory is described as "a home for everything you want your Character to hold onto," and the post says anything written there or pinned stays put however full the memory bar gets. Facts is a c.ai+ layer that "picks them up as you chat and saves them automatically," sorted into Persona, Character and side-character entries you can edit. Memory Usage is a bar showing how much of the window Facts, Story Memories and message history occupy, with a fuller view on paid tiers. The plus page labels the tiers Basic, Better and Best, which are adjectives; the numbers behind them are 15 pins against 30, a basic Lorebook against an advanced one, and a "Limited" against "Detailed" usage view.
This is where the old c.ai nostalgia actually lives. On the beta site there was one model and one context window and everyone got the same one, and the 2023 help article said the company was "working on extending this context." Two years later the extension exists, and it is split across tiers: 15 or 30 pins, a Facts layer that is paid, a Lorebook that is basic or advanced. What people remember as "the old model remembered more" is partly the flattening of a context window that now comes in sizes.
What does the Character AI subreddit keep complaining about?
The recurring themes on r/CharacterAI, as of its front page captured on 24 August 2026, are reply length, model quality by name, repetition, outages and the filter. None of them is a fact about the product. They are a description of what the loudest users notice, which is the only way a subreddit can be used. Character.AI links it from its own help center as "the official Subreddit," and its rules ban "promotion of other tools or services," so the complaints there come from people who stayed.
Read across a page of top posts and the shape is consistent. Posts ask how replies "went from long as hell to short as hell." Posts name the chat styles like characters in their own right, PipSqueak 2 (PS2) on Free and DeepSqueak (DS) on the paid tiers, and argue about which one got worse this week. Posts report repeated messages and "chat error" pop-ups, and one title is simply "The website is barely functional." Posts complain that the filter now blocks "action and hostility in bots," which is the same tension the company's own 2023 NSFW note described when it said "villain Characters should not always be calm and polite" while pornographic content "will not be supported at any point in the future." The pinned official posts on that page are the things the paid tiers sell: private Lorebooks for c.ai+, plus a block-user button.
Notice what is missing. Nobody on that page is asking for the beta site's layout back. Two years after the retirement, the "old c.ai" thread is about reply length and memory, and both of those now have a price attached. The old site is a proxy for a model behaviour the company has since partitioned into Free, Lite and Plus.
Related reading
I ran the same four questions through PolyBuzz, Character.AI, and five other apps. If you want the full breakdown, start with what is PolyBuzz, and what the memory tier buys. The ten-minute memory test itself, with results by platform, is in best AI companion apps: a ten-minute test that sorts them.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still use the old Character AI website?
No. beta.character.ai was retired on 24 September 2024 and the help center says "the old website is no longer accessible." The Classic layout under Chat Preferences on character.ai is the official replacement for its look.
What happened to beta.character.ai chats?
They were migrated to character.ai and the mobile app, and any chat older than six months could be pulled across manually with "Migrate chats." Nothing was deleted, and chat history per Character was later raised from 100 to 1,000 in December 2025.
Why can't under-18 users chat on Character AI anymore?
Character.AI removed open-ended chat for under-18s by 25 November 2025, citing questions from regulators about "how open-ended AI chat in general might affect teens." Teens keep Character creation, scenes, videos, Feed and Imagine Chat.
How much is c.ai+, and what is Character AI Lite?
c.ai+ is $9.99 a month or $94.99 a year on the App Store, with no ads, 30 pins and the advanced Lorebook. Lite starts at $4.99 a month and gives a daily allowance of premium-model messages, 30 pins and fewer ads, then drops to the standard model for the rest of the day.
How many pinned memories do you get on Character AI?
15 on Free and 30 on Lite and c.ai+, per the c.ai+ page on 17 September 2026. Pins launched at 5 per chat in March 2024, and since May 2026 they sit inside Story Memory alongside a paid Facts layer.
Is the Character AI subreddit an official source?
It is the official subreddit, linked from the help center, but its posts are opinions from users who stayed. Its rules ban promotion of other tools, and its recurring themes are reply length, model quality, repetition and the filter.
The beta site had one model, one context window and one price, which was nothing. The current site has three chat styles, a memory bar with a paid layer, and two subscriptions whose whole difference is whether the better model comes with a daily counter. "Old c.ai" is not a URL you can revisit; it is a pricing structure that no longer exists.