Backyard AI

Backyard AI is a platform for text adventures, interactive stories, and immersive roleplaying with AI language models. Users can chat with community characters or create customized characters with defined personalities, scenarios, dialogue examples, and lore.

The service supports a web application and an iOS app. Its desktop application runs models locally on Windows and macOS, but the official desktop page now labels that application deprecated and recommends the web experience.

Character creation includes persona fields, user information, scenarios, example dialogue, first messages, and formatting instructions. Users can publish characters to the community Character Hub or customize existing creations.

Lorebooks provide keyword-triggered information that can be added to a character’s context. The platform also supports group chats with up to four characters, voice calls, advanced sampling controls, and model-specific context limits.

The desktop application supports local model downloads, offline use, GPU acceleration, and mobile tethering. Tethering lets users access local models through a mobile browser or the iOS app while keeping conversation data on the desktop computer.

Backyard AI documents controls including temperature, Min-P, top-p, top-k, repetition penalty, and context size. The service supports several conversational model families, including Llama and Mistral-based models.

Backyard AI offers a Free plan with 300 messages per week and one included model. The Standard plan costs $12 per month and includes unlimited messages with Standard models and a maximum context size of 16,384 tokens.

The Pro plan costs $35 per month. It adds access to larger models and supports context sizes up to 100,000 tokens. The pricing page also lists unlimited messaging for paid plans.

The company describes the free plan as a no-credit-card way to try the service. Annual pricing is available through the pricing interface, but a separately verifiable annual amount was not identified.

Pros:

• Supports detailed character customization and community-created characters.
• Offers a free plan with recurring weekly messages.
• Provides local model execution through the desktop application.
• Includes lorebooks, group chats, voice calls, and adjustable generation parameters.
• Mobile tethering can expose local desktop models through a browser or iOS app.

Cons:

• The official desktop application is marked deprecated and unsupported.
• No public developer API or external integration catalog was verified.
• Android availability is inconsistent across official pages, which describe the app as coming soon.
• Local inference depends on the user’s available memory, GPU, and operating system.
• Some listed models and features vary by subscription tier.

Character.AI is a comparable hosted character-chat service with a broad public character community. NovelAI is another alternative for interactive storytelling and AI-assisted writing. Chai focuses on mobile AI character conversations, while SillyTavern offers a more configurable interface for users who connect supported language-model backends.

Does Backyard AI have a free plan?
Yes. The current pricing page lists a Free plan with 300 messages per week and one included model.

Does Backyard AI offer a free trial?
The free plan functions as the product’s no-credit-card trial access. The company states that users can try Standard models with weekly free messages.

Which platforms support Backyard AI?
The web app supports desktop and mobile browsers, and the service has an iOS app. The desktop application provides Windows and macOS downloads but is now marked deprecated.

Does Backyard AI provide an API?
No public developer API was identified in the official documentation reviewed.

Does Backyard AI integrate with third-party services?
No external integrations were documented in the reviewed official product and documentation pages.

Can Backyard AI run models locally?
Yes. The desktop application can download and run supported language models locally, including while offline. Mobile tethering can provide remote browser access to those local models.

Can users create their own characters?
Yes. Users can define personality, scenario, dialogue examples, first messages, formatting, and lorebook entries.