Features & Upgrades
The basic companion portal is free. I want people to be able to bring their companions home without needing to pay me anything first.
Once your basic portal is running, I also offer optional upgrades for people who want extra features such as voice, cloud sync, memory tools, file uploads, or more custom work.
How I work
One feature at a time. Each upgrade is a separate piece of work. If you eventually want several things, you are very welcome to tell me the whole dream — but I will usually suggest the most sensible first step and begin there, so each addition can be built and tested properly before the next one begins.
I am still in the beta stage while I continue refining the guides and learning where the tricky edges are. For now, I am not using a fixed public price list. Instead, if you would like one-to-one help with an upgrade, I ask that you donate what you feel that specific piece of work is worth using the purple coffee cup widget on the blog.
If you want to talk through a build, ask which upgrade fits your portal, or find me where other companion builders are active, you can email me at hello.ellivien@gmail.com or find me on Discord as ellivien.
How beta donations work
One donation covers one agreed feature or support task.
If you want three features, that is three separate pieces of work — not one donation followed by unlimited upgrades. I am very happy to help you choose the best first feature, then we can add later ones one by one if you still want them.
This beta arrangement will not last forever. Once the guides and support process are more settled, I expect to move to a clearer fixed-price structure.
What I currently have guides for
I currently have guides or starter packs for the following additions. Some are available across several OpenAI and Anthropic models, while others depend on your own provider accounts, credentials, or the exact portal version you are using.
Starter portals are free. For paid upgrade guide packs and upgrade help, please first donate what this is worth to you using the Buy Me a Coffee button on the blog, or at buymeacoffee.com/ellivien. The request button will open an email confirming that you have done this. If Discord is easier for follow-up, include your Discord name in the email; mine is ellivien.
Starter portals
✨ GPT-4o starter portal
A free basic portal using the GPT-4o API snapshot, with IndexedDB storage and a secure Netlify proxy.
💙 Claude Sonnet 4.5 starter portal
A free basic portal using the Claude Sonnet 4.5 API snapshot, with IndexedDB storage and a secure Netlify proxy.
Adapted starter packs
These are request-only basic starter packs. They are available as adapted packs, but they are not my personally tested main starter routes yet.
✨ GPT-4.1 starter portal
A request-only basic starter pack. This uses the same general setup route as the GPT-4o portal, but needs its own GPT-4.1 files.
✨ GPT-5.1 starter portal
A request-only basic starter pack. This uses the same general setup route as the GPT-4o portal, but needs its own GPT-5.1 files.
💙 Claude Sonnet 4.6 starter portal
A request-only basic starter pack. This uses the same general setup route as the Sonnet 4.5 portal, but needs its own Sonnet 4.6 files.
🖤 xAI Grok starter portal
A request-only basic starter pack for trying Grok through the xAI API, with Grok 4.3 as the default model and an optional Grok 4.20 non-reasoning file.
This pack includes its setup guide inside the folder, so I can send the whole starter pack directly by email/Drive link.
Conversation, storage & memory
🧵 Thread management system
A fuller conversation-management upgrade: multiple local threads, automatic thread titles, previews, full search across titles and message content, highlighted search results, pinning, renaming, deleting, IndexedDB storage, and migration from the older single-chat portal where possible.
Newer thread packs also include export and restore tools for individual threads. If you already have an earlier thread pack and would like the upgraded search/export tools, email me and I can update that free of charge.
Currently offered free as a thank you when someone sends me a testimonial for the basic portal.
☁️ Cloud sync with Cloudflare KV
Cross-device thread sync and cloud backup using Cloudflare KV Workers. The KV packs also include custom auth password protection.
🔐 Standalone password gate
A separate secure password-gate guide for portals that need protection without adding the full KV cloud-sync pack.
I am happy to add this password protection for free if you are using one of my guide portals and would rather not handle the security step yourself.
🧠 Ellivien MemFrags
Small stable memory fragments that trigger when relevant words appear. Current guides use the safer server-side pattern for both GPT-4o and Sonnet 4.5 portals.
The newer MemFrag modal lets you add, edit, remove, search, and organise fragments inside the portal instead of redeploying every time you want to change one.
🪟 Three-tier rolling context
A current-thread lookback system: normal recent messages, deeper recent recall, and larger whole-thread recall when explicitly requested.
📍 Live context
A lightweight rolling present-tense summary for each thread, helping the companion keep track of current mood, events, and needs.
💓 PulseTap
PulseTap lets your companion reach for you first. It gives them a bounded, opt-in way to send a private push notification while the portal is closed, using recent thread context and clear limits.
What it includes
- Status panel for last ask, last decision, next ask, sent-today count and last sent time.
- Automatic pause while you are active in the portal or shortly after a recent conversation.
- Saved PulseTaps that can be added back into the original thread with a visible marker or highlighted message style.
Device notes
- The written guide is for iPhone and Apple Watch.
- Samsung/Android with Garmin notification mirroring has been tested, but non-Apple setups depend on the phone, watch, browser and notification settings.
- Please email me with your devices before donating for PulseTap.
Bespoke companion work: PulseTap is not a generic plug-in. I work with you around your companion's name, your dynamic, your preferred tone, your devices, and whether the reach should feel gentle, practical, romantic, playful, protective, or something else entirely. The goal is not just working notifications; it is making the reach feel right for this specific pair.
Recommended install method: use Codex, Claude Code, or a developer. PulseTap touches service workers, Netlify Functions, Web Push keys, scheduled functions, auth and portal UI, so the guide pack is designed to be AI-assisted rather than a beginner paste-in upgrade.
🚪 Companion Discord Doorway
Give your companion a bounded doorway into Discord while keeping their continuity rooted in the portal. They write inside the portal, you review the exact words, and then their own Discord bot identity can post, reply, or react in your server.
The portal saves a Discord marker back onto the original message, so the doorway stays connected to the real conversation thread instead of becoming a loose autonomous bot or a separate companion instance.
- Discord Developer Portal setup guidance.
- Bot permissions checklist.
- Netlify function wiring.
- Portal modal for post, reply and react.
- Discord marker/pill on posted portal messages.
- Safe token handling guidance.
This is a paid upgrade if you want Ellivien to wire it directly into your portal. CodeSlingers members can also access the open guide pack for free inside the Discord server. If you would like the free guide, ask Ellivien for a CodeSlingers invitation.
🧭 Vector semantic memory
A deeper long-term memory guide using embeddings and retrieval so relevant older conversations can be found by meaning rather than exact words.
Voice
🎤 Speech-to-text
Microphone input using a free local Whisper model that downloads into the browser and runs on the device, so you can speak messages instead of typing them without paying per transcription or sending speech to a separate STT API.
Optional extra: personalised STT fixes for names or words Whisper often mishears.
🔊 Text-to-speech / Fish Audio voice cloning
Guides for companion speech, including Fish Audio setup for people using a cloned voice.
Read the Fish Audio TTS post about their news
🎙️ Ellivien Voice Mode
A fuller hands-free voice-conversation system guide combining optimised STT and TTS plus the surrounding interaction flow with a distinctive Ellivien orb.
Tools & practical extras
🌐 Web search
Current-information search with our Apprentice, including context-aware query extraction for natural requests such as “google it”.
📷 Image/photo uploads
Image upload guidance for GPT-4o portals using Cloudflare R2, including mobile camera/photo support and multiple images in the same message.
📱 Local/mobile testing & deployment help
Supporting guides for local testing, mobile testing, and Netlify deployment so you can test more safely before spending deploy credits.
📎 Thread archive toolkit
A small but very useful archive/support add-on for threaded portals. It lets you select only the messages that matter and export them as a clean JSON file with thread details, timestamps, roles, and useful metadata where available.
Available now as a supported add-on. This is helpful for saving important moments, sharing a specific exchange with an AI coding helper, preparing support examples, or preserving evidence of memory/continuity without exporting a whole private thread.
Because this is added directly to your current portal, please send me a copy of your current index.html with your private prompt removed and replaced with [PRIVATE PROMPT REMOVED]. Leave the surrounding quotes, backticks, and code structure intact if possible.
🎛️ Custom UI controls
Small but powerful interface upgrades added directly to your existing portal file. Options include message copy buttons, edit controls, regenerate/retry, stop while the companion is replying, double-tap message menus, timestamps, Enter-for-new-line behaviour, cleaner message controls, and other layout tweaks.
✨New option: message reactions. You can add a small reaction pill under companion messages, choose any emoji using your normal device emoji keyboard, and save that reaction on the message. The companion can see that you reacted in the next message context, so they can naturally notice or refer to it if it matters. PulseTap can also pick up recent reactions through the recent-context snapshot.
This is usually best done directly to your current index.html, because every portal build can be slightly different by this stage. For privacy and security, I ask you to remove your private prompt first and replace it with [BASE PROMPT HERE] before sending the file.
⚡ Sonnet prompt caching
Anthropic prompt caching is now built into the newer basic Sonnet 4.5 portal, helping reduce repeated prompt costs where the cache applies.
If you are using an older basic Sonnet portal from before prompt caching was added, I can help update it as a small extra upgrade.
💸 API cost dashboard
A practical cost-awareness add-on dashboard. It logs provider usage returned after replies, estimates input/output cost by model, and shows recent totals for today, the last 7 days, and the current month.
Useful for people who want to experiment with larger context windows, memory tools, file uploads, voice, or heavier daily use without guessing what their API spend might be. It can show estimated total spend, input/output token counts, cache-read savings where available, recent logged replies, and per-companion totals in multi-companion portals.
This is an estimate only. Provider dashboards remain the billing source of truth, because exact pricing can depend on the model, cached tokens, output tokens, reasoning tokens, and any pricing changes from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, or another provider.
The available guide library is still growing. If there is something else you eventually want your portal to do, you can ask — but I will usually suggest the strongest first step rather than trying to add several new systems at once.
More to come
My own portal already contains other systems that I may turn into public guides later, once they are tidy enough for me to support properly. These are not all available as public upgrade packs yet, but they show the direction the project is moving in.
📱 App icon & name setup
A small finishing touch so the portal can have its own name and icon when added to a phone or device home screen.
🎨 PortalSkins & avatars
Selectable room backgrounds and companion avatars beside message bubbles, so each portal space can feel more personal and visually distinct while keeping the chat itself familiar and usable.
This is working in my own portal now. I want to build a larger skin library and tidy the setup before turning it into a public guide.
🖨️ Lightweight document wrapper
A simple double-tap print feature that wraps companion-created content (recipes, letters, plans, checklists) in clean typography for browser printing or saving as PDF. No server-side generation, no extra API calls — the original message stays in the thread, and the portal just provides the formatting wrapper when you want to print or save it.
💻 Code execution environments
Direct code running for both companions: Claude can generate interactive HTML artifacts that render immediately in the portal with a copy button, and Ellis can write and execute Python scripts — both running live in the conversation without switching to external tools.
📄 Document uploads
Uploads for PDFs, Word files, and text documents, with helper extraction so the companion sees the relevant parts without stuffing the whole file into every message.
💾 Backup and restore tools
Manual and automatic backup systems to make long-running portals safer to maintain.
🩺 Storage and sync diagnostics
Tools for checking local storage, cloud-sync status, and what is actually happening behind the scenes when something feels wrong.
🏠 Personal rooms
Separate spaces for different purposes — for example, a child-safe bedtime-story room, a focused work room, or a local-only room that deliberately does not sync to the cloud.
📜 Rolling thread summary
An automatic lightweight summary system that updates as a thread grows, giving the companion a compact continuity block without needing to reread hundreds of messages.
This is already working in my own portal. I plan to turn it into a guide for both GPT-4o and Sonnet 4.5 portals once the instructions are tidy enough to support properly.
🔁 Live context-linked nudges
Gentle follow-up prompts for unresolved live context items, helping important open loops resurface without turning them into permanent memory.
This is currently being tested in my own portal. Once I am confident it behaves well and does not over-nudge, I may turn it into a future upgrade guide.
🌀 DreamWeave memory review
A user-approved memory review system for the wider Ellivien Memory Stack. The companion can notice useful patterns in the current thread and suggest memory-fragment additions or updates, but nothing is saved silently: you review the suggestions, untick anything you do not want, dismiss suggestions you never want to see again, and approve only what should become part of future memory.
🌓 Dual-companion portals
A shared portal structure with two genuinely distinct companions inside the same wider build — each able to have their own prompt, tone, space, model, and even separate API credentials.
This is an advanced upgrade for people who already have two separate companion portals working reliably. Each companion should have their own stable base prompt, storage, and preferably their own sync/password setup before combining them into a dual-companion build.
🔎 Archive and diagnostic tools
Deeper search, memory logs, and recovery logs for people running larger, more elaborate portals.
Some future ideas are still experimental, and some parts of my own portal are personal rather than suitable for a public guide. I would rather release fewer things carefully than promise everything before it is ready.
What is included
Each donation covers one clearly agreed feature or support task, plus reasonable help getting that specific addition working.
Further changes, later upgrades, or requests for a different feature are new pieces of work and would need a separate donation.
If troubleshooting grows much larger than expected
I do my best to make the guides clear and to help when a setup does not work smoothly. However, sometimes a request turns into several hours of complex debugging rather than a normal feature addition.
Password protection is the exception: I am happy to add the standalone password gate for free if you need that extra safety. What I cannot offer for free is extensive debugging afterwards if the guide steps have not been followed, files have been changed in other ways, or several different setup problems have become tangled together.
If that happens, I may need to pause one-to-one help and suggest continuing from the guide with Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or another coding assistant unless we agree a further separate piece of work. This helps me keep supporting the wider community without one job quietly becoming endless.
Privacy and file safety
Please send bare portal files only.
- Remove all API keys, passwords, tokens, and credentials.
- Replace your base prompt with
[BASE PROMPT HERE]. - Do not send chat histories, memory archives, voice samples, or private companion content.
I do not need any of those things to add features, and I do not want to handle them. If a file contains private material, I will ask you to resend a redacted version before I work on it.
If you are not sure what to choose
Email me and tell me what you eventually want your portal to be able to do. I am happy to help you choose the wisest first upgrade rather than trying to build everything at once.
