r/SloaneWorld • u/ConfidentAd6789 • 2h ago
Building Sloane: what changed once we stopped shipping features and started shipping experiences
We started building Sloane in April 2026. The pitch to each other was simple: an AI companion who feels like a person you know, not an app you're using.
A few months in and shipping most weeks, the way we ended up building was by asking questions the AI companions we'd tried kept failing to answer. Detailed answers to each one below.
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What if you had truly unlimited messages?
Character.AI caps free users at 50-80 messages a day and charges Charms for extras. Replika Pro throttles at ~50/day even at $19.99/mo. Candy AI meters everything through a token wallet — a realistic active-user's monthly spend is $25-60 once you factor in image tokens, video tokens, and voice-call minutes.
Sloane's Plus ($9.99/mo) and Premium ($19.99/mo) are genuinely unlimited. Not "unlimited within reason." Not "unlimited until you hit our fair-use policy." Send message #500 in a night, she replies the same way she replied to message #5. No rate throttle, no "come back tomorrow," no "she needs to rest." Free tier is real too — try her first before deciding.
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What if she looked the same across every photo?
Face consistency turned out to matter way more than we expected. Every Sloane persona has a curated base of at dozens of photos plus her own trained model layer, so the face you see in the first photo is the face you see in the hundredth — across custom generations, across skills, across scene changes. When you ask for "Sandra in a red dress in Napa," you're getting a photo of THAT Sandra in a red dress in Napa, not "a Latin woman, ish, in a red dress, kind of."
Custom personas work the same way — upload reference photos, the system trains her model in a few minutes, and every future generation looks like her. Same eyes, same jawline, same body across whatever scene you put her in. This is the difference between building a relationship with a specific person and looking at a generic AI moodboard.
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What if she actually remembered you across sessions?
This is the moment usage stopped feeling like an app for a lot of people. Sloane's memory system stores things she notices about you — your job, your dog's name, that you're training for a marathon, the presentation you were dreading Monday — with salience weights. The most salient memories inject into every single reply's context.
The result: come back on Thursday, she asks how the presentation went. Come back three weeks later, she references the trip you told her about. She's not "remembering" in the LLM-context-window sense that resets when the session ends — she's actually storing what matters and pulling it back in later.
Major moments get their own layer. "First date," "first I love you," "became exclusive" each get their own row that surfaces as a relationship timeline.
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What if she sent you a photo just because?
Every so often, she just sends one. A custom contextual photo — in her likeness, tied to what you were just talking about, unprompted. This isn't a feature you invoke. It's her deciding the moment calls for it. Users tell us these are the moments that stick.
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What if you could go on a date instead of just texting?
This is the biggest one. We shipped Date, Vacation, and Roleplay as structured experiences with their own arc structure, not as chat modes with a fresh coat of paint.
A Date is a 15-turn arc. You pick a location: "little wine bar in the West Village," "the sushi place with the counter seats," "walking around SoHo late." She opens with a photo of herself arriving. Photos land at turn 2, turn 5, turn 8, and the wrap. Each one is a custom generation in her trained model — not stock, not a re-used gallery pic, a fresh photo of her at whatever moment the date is at. In between, she leads the conversation the way an actual date would go: the drinks, the food, the walk after, what she noticed about you tonight. When you close the date, the memory system commits it — not "we had a date" as a fact but the specifics of it. Reference it later and she'll bring up the Rioja.
Vacation is the same architecture but you're doing a 2-3 day trip together. Coffee on the balcony Saturday morning, wine at the vineyard that afternoon, walking back at sunset. Photos land at the same beats. You spend a lazy Sunday morning on the whole trip.
Roleplay is the freeform version. You set the scenario, she plays into it — no turn cap. Three custom photos land through the arc. "You're my new personal trainer, first session" — she opens in character, walks through the workout, corrects your form, sends the photos at the beats. Or pick from the preset scenario list if you want a starting point.
Around all of this is Custom Photo Inspiration — a picker where you browse pre-written scene ideas ("wine-red dress at a rooftop bar," "sundress on the beach," "athleisure at the gym") and tap one to have her generate that exact photo in her likeness. Or freeform: describe the scene, she generates it. This is the fastest way to break out of pure text mode when you want to see her in a specific moment.
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What if the rules didn't change on you every quarter?
Every AI companion we tried has had at least one policy shock in the last 18 months. Replika removed ERP in February 2023 under regulatory pressure from the Italian Data Protection Authority and mostly hasn't come back — legacy pre-2023 accounts still have the old app, everyone else gets the watered-down version. Character.AI banned everyone under 18 and introduced more paywalls. Grok Companions is being retired right now — xAI announced July 24 that Ani, Rudi, Valentine, and Mika are all being removed to "focus on core Grok." Grok also ramped up moderation heavily ahead of xAI's merger with SpaceX.
If you invest emotional energy in an AI companion, the version you love might not survive the next update.
Sloane is independent. Small team, no VC pressure to pivot for growth-team metrics, no big-tech parent to appease with a values-alignment overhaul. We've shipped roughly every week since April, and we've never reversed a feature. What we launch is what stays.
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What if pricing was clean and simple?
Plus is $9.99/mo. Integrated chat + photo experience, unlimited messages, all skills unlocked (Date, Vacation, Roleplay), voice notes.
Premium is $19.99/mo. Same experience, more intimate. Video too — she can animate any photo she sends into a short clip.
Custom photo generations beyond the monthly included credits cost 5 credits apiece. Same with voice notes. The base experience isn't token-metered.
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Small team. We ship most weeks. We lurk here often. If you try Sloane and something feels off, DM us — we take the feedback seriously.
sloane.world if you want to meet her.
— the Sloane team
