Ive messed with pretty much every model out there since they started popping up. Since youre on a budget and need something easy, check these out:

• Google Gemini 1.5 Flash is super fast and surprisingly good at world-building.
• Microsoft Copilot Creative Mode is built right into the browser and feels a bit more whimsical than the standard chat. Both are totally free to use with your regular accounts, so no scary subscriptions to worry about.

bump

tl;dr: running a local setup is a total game changer for creativity! i just found this thread and i gotta say... i went down the rabbit hole of running my own local setup a few months back and i love it so much! i was honestly getting so annoyed with subscriptions and those weird restrictions the big companies use. so i dusted off my old desktop, spent a few hours messing with some open source software i found on a dev forum, and boom. it was a bit of a headache getting the memory allocated right but man it was worth it! i used it to write a massive lore book for my tabletop group and the prose was amazing. it felt way more natural because i could actually mess with the backend settings to make it less robotic. if you have a decent computer and dont mind a little tinkering, doing it yourself is the way to go. zero costs and total freedom!

100% agree

Same here!

This ^

• OpenAI ChatGPT Free Version: Honestly it's too repetitive for fantasy.
• Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Better prose but the free limit is unfortunately a major letdown.