If you opened Character.AI on the free tier recently and wondered where all the chat styles went, here is the short version: they are gone, and they are not coming back.
On May 8, Character.AI removed nearly every legacy chat style from the app. Roar, Dynamic, Pawly, Meow, Nyan, and the legacy submenu all disappeared, leaving free users with PipSqueak 2 as the only option (DeepSqueak remains in the picker, but unlimited use still requires a subscription). Soft Launch, the slower-paced style many longtime users preferred, returned the same day with a catch: it is now exclusive to c.ai+, the roughly nine-dollar-a-month subscription.
The move was telegraphed, if not exactly spelled out. The company’s April 14 blog post introduced PipSqueak 2 as a model that would “replace” the original PipSqueak, with c.ai+ members getting first access and free users following in early May. What the post did not say plainly was that the rest of the chat-style menu would retire with it. PSQ2 became the default for most accounts on April 28, and the May 8 cutover finished the job.
The reaction on r/CharacterAI was loud and sustained. A community megathread reportedly drew hundreds of comments within hours, and the complaint that keeps surfacing a month later is sameness: users say PSQ2 responses feel interchangeable across very different characters, where the old styles each had a distinct personality. The company’s framing, in that same April post, is cost. Character.AI says it has no outside investors and that consolidating models is part of keeping the free tier free, alongside the expanded ads and usage limits that arrived this spring.
Where things stand now: the free experience is PipSqueak 2 with ads, variety is a paid feature, and the company says DeepSqueak 2 is already in training. If the new single-model Character.AI is not working for you, our Character.AI review covers what the platform still does well, and the Character.AI vs Janitor AI and Kindroid vs Character.AI comparisons cover the two most common destinations for people shopping around. The overall rankings are the wider view.