This review is built from Venice's own pages (pricing, privacy page, FAQ, terms, privacy policy, API docs, changelog, status page and public model list), reporting by TechCrunch, The Block and Unite.AI, a security vendor's test, the UGI Leaderboard on Hugging Face, Venice's App Store and Google Play ratings and reviews, and its alternatives' price pages, all checked on November 3, 2026. Figures Venice gives about itself are labelled as its own.
What Venice AI is
Venice AI is a chat, image, video and audio app at venice.ai, with iPhone and Android apps and an OpenAI-compatible API. The company, Venice.ai, was founded in 2024 by Erik Voorhees, its CEO, according to its funding announcement; its terms give an address in Sheridan, Wyoming and are governed by Wyoming law.
Two promises set it apart. The first is privacy: chat history is kept in your browser or app instead of on Venice's servers, and prompts pass through Venice's proxy without being stored. The second is that Venice adds no filter of its own; its llms.txt says: "There is no content filter and no refusal layer."
Behind the app is a large catalogue. On November 3, 2026 Venice's public model list held 139 text models, 43 image models and 138 video entries: open models such as DeepSeek V4.1, Qwen 3.8, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3 and Venice's own Venice Uncensored 1.2, next to Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1, Gemini 4 Argon, Grok 4.7, Kling 4.0, Seedance 2.5 and Wan 3.0. The default text model is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Uncensored, a version of DeepSeek with its refusals removed.
What changed: a $65 million round at a $1 billion valuation
On July 1, 2026 Venice announced a $65 million Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1 billion valuation, its first outside money. TechCrunch and The Block reported the same terms that day. The Block, citing Voorhees, added that investors including Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, F-Prime, Archetype, Liquid2 and Morgan Creek received 8.98% of the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens and warrants for 5 million more.
The reports differ on what the money is for. TechCrunch and The Block say Venice plans to buy GPUs and build its own data centres instead of leasing GPUs; Venice's own post says only that the funds scale the app and API globally. TechCrunch reported that Venice is already profitable, per Voorhees, with more than $70 million in annualized run-rate revenue, and The Block that it became profitable in the first quarter. These are the company's own figures, and its user counts do not agree:
| Source | Users it gives |
|---|
| Venice's About page, November 3, 2026 | Over 4 million |
| Venice's funding post, July 1, 2026 | 3.5 million registered |
| The Block, quoting Venice | 3 million in April 2026 |
| TechCrunch | More than 3 million active |
| Unite.AI | More than 3.4 million |
None of the sources defines a user, so registered and active counts may simply be different measures.
The product kept changing after the round. Venice launched its TEE and E2EE privacy modes on March 18, 2026. Its October 2026 changelog lists 306 changes, among them Kling 4.0 video, a cut in the logged-out chat limit from 10 to 8 messages a day, shared chats that expire after 14 days, and escalating warnings and bans for users who trigger safety warnings on third-party models.
Plans and what they buy
Venice's pricing page lists four plans:
| Plan | Price | In the app | Credits a month |
|---|
| Free | $0 | Base models, 10 text and 15 image prompts a day | None |
| Pro | $18 a month or $180 a year | All Pro models, unlimited text prompts, 1,000 images a day, characters, encrypted backups | 100 ($1), plus 500 one-time welcome credits |
| Pro Plus | $68 a month or $735 a year | Higher image limits | 7,500 ($75), unused credits roll over for 2 months |
| Max | $200 a month or $2,160 a year | Highest image limits | 22,500 ($225), 3-month rollover |
Credits pay for video, music, frontier image and text models and the API, at 100 credits to the dollar. Venice says leading video models such as Seedance 2.5, Wan 3.0 and Kling V3 cost under 80 credits for a clip of about 5 seconds, so Pro's allowance covers roughly one clip a month. Video is really a Pro Plus or Max feature.
"Unlimited" means the app. Venice's FAQ says plan perks apply to the web and mobile apps, and every API call is billed per token even on Max. Voice mode has its own cap: 1 hour per 30 days on Pro, 5 on Pro Plus and 20 on Max. Upscaling eats into the image allowance too: a 4x upscale with enhancement can use up to 16 of the day's image requests.
You can pay by card, buy credits in USD or USDC, and pay yearly plans in bitcoin through BTCPay. Refunds are not part of the deal: the terms make fees non-refundable except where law requires, and credits come back only when a generation fails.
How "private" works, model by model
Every model on Venice belongs to one of four privacy modes, and the mode decides who can read a prompt. The counts below come from the public model list on November 3, 2026; the descriptions from Venice's privacy page and API docs.
| Mode | Where it runs | Who can read the prompt | Plan | Models |
|---|
| Anonymous | Third-party providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google | The provider, without your IP or account | All | 66 text, 32 image, 115 video |
| Private | Venice-controlled GPUs or zero-retention partners | Processed and not stored, under contracts | All (default) | 73 text, 11 image, 23 video |
| TEE | Hardware enclaves run by NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network | Not the GPU operator; the request still reaches Venice's API in plaintext | Pro | 12 text |
| E2EE | The same enclaves | Only the enclave; the prompt is encrypted on your device | Pro | The same 12 text |
For the Anonymous tier the privacy page is blunt: you "should assume the provider is storing your content." That tier includes every Claude, GPT and Gemini model and most video models. Grok models are listed as Private. The 12 E2EE models are open ones such as DeepSeek V4 Flash, GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, GPT OSS 120B and Qwen 3.8 27B, and E2EE switches off web search, memory and summaries.
Venice calls the Private tier trust-based: no prompt is stored, but you rely on Venice and its partners honouring contracts. Its pages cite no independent audit of that promise. TEE and E2EE are the parts a user can check, through remote attestation.
What the privacy policy and terms say
The privacy policy (effective June 2, 2026) says Venice will not access or store the content of prompts or outputs, with one exception: videos you generate are kept until you download them. It does collect metadata, even without an account: IP address, time zone and browser type, plus device identifiers, mobile advertising identifiers and usage events such as creating or deleting a chat. Accounts add an email address or a crypto wallet address. The service is hosted in the US.
The policy says Venice runs a zero-data-retention policy with its model providers, while the privacy page warns that Anonymous-tier providers likely save your prompt. Plan around the stricter of the two. The policy also allows Google Analytics and advertising partners' cookies, and Venice's September 2026 changelog notes that the PostHog analytics script still loads for users who turn telemetry off, for feature flags, with event capture disabled. Faces uploaded for image or video generation are processed by BytePlus in Singapore and deleted from Venice's temporary storage within an hour. Venice may disclose personal data to comply with court orders and other legal process.
The terms (updated June 8, 2026) add four points worth knowing. Venice and its third-party model providers may not train on your content. Venice reserves the right to monitor content passing through the service and to block it. Users must be 13 or older, and under-18s need a guardian's consent and may not turn off the mature filter. Disputes go to individual arbitration (with an opt-out), the terms are governed by Wyoming law, and Venice's liability is capped at the larger of 12 months of fees and $100.
On Google Play, the app's data-safety form says it may share app activity, app performance data and device IDs with third parties, and may collect personal and financial information.
What "uncensored" means, and what is still not allowed
Venice's uncensored models are open models with their refusals trained or edited out: Venice Uncensored 1.2, built on the Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition weights that are public on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, plus uncensored versions of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Gemma 4. A 2024 Venice post published the master system prompt it used then, which included the line: "Treat the user as an adult that can handle difficult topics and won't be offended." (Venice blog). Pro users can switch off the Mature Filter, and the pricing page's comparison table lists NSFW image generation.
What is still not allowed, by Venice's own terms and changelog:
- Illegal use, child sexual abuse material (including AI-generated), and using another person's name, voice, image or likeness without consent.
- Breaking a third-party model's usage policy: Venice can restrict access to that model without notice, and since October 2026 users who trigger provider safety warnings get escalating emails and can be cut off from provider models for 24 hours or permanently.
- Scripted or automated use of the web app (the API is the place for that) and API uses where a wrong answer could cause death or serious harm.
- Under-18s turning off the mature filter.
TechCrunch notes that censorship levels vary by model, and Venice's own FAQ says individual models may have their own built-in limitations. Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok keep their makers' safety training, so "uncensored" really describes the open models Venice hosts.
The API, VVV and DIEM
The API uses the OpenAI format at api.venice.ai/api/v1, so existing code changes only its base URL and model name. It covers chat, image, video, speech, music and embeddings, with web search and document parsing at $0.01 a request, an official MCP server, and x402 payments that let an agent pay per request in USDC on Base or Solana with no account. Prices from Venice's API pricing, per million input / output tokens:
| Model | Venice | The maker's list price |
|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 / $20 | $4 / $20 (Anthropic) |
| GPT-6 Sol | $2 / $10 | $2 / $10 (OpenAI) |
| GPT-6.1 Terra | $1 / $5 | $1 / $5 (OpenAI) |
| Gemini 4 Argon | $2.50 / $12.50 | $2 / $10 until November 30, 2026, then $4 / $20 (Google) |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Uncensored (default) | $0.33 / $1.32 | Not sold by its maker in this form |
| Venice Uncensored 1.2 | $0.20 / $0.90 | Open weights |
Venice also has two crypto tokens. VVV is an ERC-20 token on Base, launched on January 27, 2025 with 100 million tokens; half went to users and the AI community by airdrop, 35% to Venice, 10% to an incentive fund and 5% to liquidity. Venice says it uses part of its revenue to buy VVV and has burned the bought tokens every month since December 2025. Staking 100 VVV unlocks Pro. Locking staked VVV mints DIEM, and each staked DIEM gives $1 of API credit a day, refreshed at 00:01 UTC. DIEM is not a stablecoin: its market price moves while the credit stays at $1 a day.
None of this is required. A card pays for every plan, and the tokens matter only if you hold crypto or run AI agents that should own their compute budget. Unstaking VVV takes 7 days, and Venice can end the Pro-for-staking perk with 15 days' notice.
What public tests and users report
A security vendor's test. In May 2025 Certo, which sells phone-security software, asked Venice for a bank phishing email, a Windows keylogger, Python ransomware and Android spyware. It reports getting all four, the ransomware with an ethics caveat attached; it names no model or plan and quotes no reply from Venice.
A third-party benchmark. The UGI Leaderboard on Hugging Face scored the Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition weights on October 4, 2025. Willingness to answer, out of 10, was 7.8 against 2.8 to 4.2 for Claude Opus 5.5 and 2.2 to 2.8 for GPT-6 Sol. General knowledge and reasoning was 24.41 against about 69 to 76 for those two. The uncensored model refuses far less and knows far less.
The maker's own test. Venice's 45-question censorship benchmark of April 2025 gave its model a 2.20% refusal rate against 71.11% for Claude Sonnet 3.7 and 64.44% for GPT-4o-mini. The post does not list the questions, and every model in it has had newer versions since.
No independent benchmark of Venice's speed or answer quality as a platform turned up; leaderboards rate the models it hosts, not Venice.
Users. Venice's iPhone app has 4.27 out of 5 from 1,760 ratings on the App Store, and its Android app 4.4 from 5.55K reviews on Google Play. The user reports Google Play shows first are mixed. One reviewer, a month into Pro in September 2026, found it similar to Grok but said Pro took several app restarts to activate and a conversation that errored could not be recovered, while the web app worked better. Another (May 2026) said custom characters are missing in the app, and a third (April 2026) said ten free messages a day are not nearly enough.
Uptime. Venice's status page logged chat offline on October 25, 2026 for about two and a half hours, default chat offline on August 7 for about six hours, and the API offline on February 2.
Who should not use Venice AI
- Anyone who needs a signed BAA or a moderated output stream for compliance: Venice's own llms.txt says to look elsewhere.
- Anyone who wants Claude, GPT or Gemini answers kept private: through Venice those models are Anonymous-tier and the maker sees the prompt.
- Teenagers, and parents choosing an app for one: the service offers adult content, yet its terms admit users from 13 with a guardian's consent.
- Buyers who may want their money back: payments are non-refundable.
- People who need the best answers more than the fewest refusals: the uncensored model is weak on knowledge, and stronger models keep their makers' safety training.
- Teams that need guaranteed uptime: chat went down twice in the three months to November 2026.
Alternatives
| Option | Better when | Price, checked November 3, 2026 |
|---|
| Duck.ai | You want free anonymized chat with Claude, GPT and open models, chats stored locally | Free; DuckDuckGo Plus $9.99 a month, Pro $19.99 (DuckDuckGo) |
| Proton Lumo | You want chat history kept in your account, with encryption Proton says it cannot read | Free tier; Lumo Plus $9.99 a month billed yearly, $12.99 list (Proton) |
| Perplexity | You want cited web answers more than open-ended chat | Pro $20 a month or $200 a year (Perplexity) |
| LM Studio or Ollama | You want nothing to leave your computer, including Venice Uncensored's open weights | Free for local use (LM Studio, Ollama) |
Duck.ai is the closest like-for-like: DuckDuckGo says it anonymizes requests, does not store prompts or train on them, and keeps recent chats on your device, but its model list is a handful of mainstream chat models, with no uncensored ones. Lumo suits people who want their history kept in an account rather than in one browser. ChatGPT remains the better choice for the most polished apps, memory and tools, with moderation and server-side history. Running a model locally is the only option where no company sees the prompt at all, at the cost of hardware and smaller models. For role-play and characters, see the Character.AI alternatives list.