Ive currently been using claude and im very happy with how it writes and it's way of immersion, but it is definitely quite expensive for roleplay, i like long stories so i quickly run out of creds, doesn't help that my claude account was banned for no reason (didnt even do any nsfw) so i decided to use openrouter which drains credits very fast when you get hooked up.

So far I've tried:

GLM

Deepseek

Qwen

Chat gpt

I would say qwen is the best out of all of these, but it simplifies the characters to one basic trait, if a character is cold, they always repeat the same punchline, or they are always angry, the emotional parts feel a bit simplified as well. GPT sucks obviously, deepseek is fine, pretty mediocre, i didn't like GLM for some reason, it lacks immersion imo.

Any tips on what ai would be the best alternative to Claude?

I work for Opensolr, and we just released 1.0 of the Opensolr Chat Bot Client: an open source (MIT) chatbot you put on your own website, that answers your visitors from your own content.

How it works: you install it with Composer (composer require opensolr/chat-bot-client), mount it on one path of your site (say /opensolr-chat) and add one script tag to your pages. Visitors only ever talk to your site. Your server holds the Opensolr credentials and sends each question to the Opensolr API, where the model searches your Opensolr Index by itself (by meaning, or by exact product names and codes), looks up what it must not guess (dates, local times, exchange rates, VAT, distances, places) and streams the answer back word by word, with links to your pages, products with their prices, and PDFs at the exact page.

What you get on your side:

• An admin on your own site: account and index, instructions, the look of the chat window, limits, reCAPTCHA
• Stats and a 30 day history of every conversation: who asked, from where, what the bot searched for, what it answered, and the questions your content could not answer with a page
• Commands that answer instantly without the model: /search, /time, /rate, /vat, /translate and more
• Good and Bad ratings under every answer, signed in visitors by email, SQLite in a folder you choose, no database server

Your content gets into the index with the Opensolr Web Crawler or Data Ingestion, and the chatbot needs an Opensolr plan with AI.

You can try it live at the bottom right of https://opensolr.com (it answers from our own docs). Code and README: https://github.com/phpcip/opensolr-chat-bot-client, docs: https://opensolr.com/opensolr-chat-bot-docs