Chub AI review: a $20 crypto-only plan and a huge user-made catalog

We opened Chub from a US connection without signing in: the homepage, the guest catalog, the subscription page, the login page, the terms, the privacy and moderation pages, and the help docs. Plain automated requests get an empty page; a normal browser loaded everything with no CAPTCHA.

We did not create an account, so chat quality, speed, memory, the NSFW settings and account deletion are untested here. Prices and rules below are quoted from the pages as they appeared that day. No payment was made.

Chub (also called CharHub, and once Venus Chub) is a hub where users publish character cards, lorebooks, presets and "stages", then chat with them. You can run a chat on Chub's own models or plug in a key from another AI provider. The docs describe the platform as uncensored and say it does not restrict "in any meaningful capacity" the characters people post.

That makes the catalog enormous and uneven. On the default guest listing we saw fantasy originals, fan characters from big franchises, and a few cards with crude taglines. Quality depends on the author of each card, not on Chub.

There is one plan: $20 a month. It unlocks Chub's models, including the large Soji model, with unlimited messages, plus voice and image generation. "Unlimited" is for one person; running parallel requests or sharing a key gets throttled.

Payment is crypto only. Chub says card companies are the main source of "censorship pressure" and it avoids them on purpose. In practice that means no card statement entry, but also no card chargeback if something goes wrong, and the terms say refunds happen only when the company grants them.

Browsing is free and needs no account. New users get one-time trial credits worth "a few dozen messages" on Chub's models. After that, chatting stays free only if you bring your own key from a provider such as OpenAI or OpenRouter, which bills you directly, or run a model on your own computer.

The terms are adults-only and ban any character, lorebook, preset or stage that sexualizes someone who is or appears under 18; images of that kind are removed. Moderation is light: a team of tag moderators, admins who delete illegal projects, comment reports and a basic word filter for comments.

The rules on real people are thin. Real photos of real people are "frowned upon" and removed if illegal, and there is no general ban on deepfakes. Because the catalog is user-written, expect to filter carefully with tags.

The privacy policy says Chub collects only what the site needs, such as usernames, and does not share user data without consent. The terms go further for private content: private characters and chats are not used to train AI models or shared with third parties. When you use the API outside Chub, message content is not logged, only metadata such as length and timing.

Public cards are different: once you publish one, every user gets a permanent license to reuse it. No retention period is published, and we could not see the account deletion flow without an account. If you connect an outside provider, its own data policy covers every message you send.

Pick it if you want the widest choice of community characters, like adjusting presets and lorebooks, or already pay for an AI provider and just need a front end.

Skip it if you can't or won't pay in crypto, want a refund policy you can count on, or prefer a curated catalog where every character has been reviewed before you see it.