CrofAI
A company claiming to offer the world's cheapest AI inference services, marketed primarily through low-cost token APIs. Investigations confirmed it to be a reseller wrapping OpenRouter's services without disclosed attribution.
Core Facts
Timeline (last 90 days)
Cline CLI v3.0.74's model catalog adds two providers, Liquid Inference and Munito AI, and removes CrofAI, iFlow and Llama.
The model catalog decreased from 7,041 to 6,457, adding three providers—Liquid Inference, Munito AI and Munito AI (EU)—and removing CrofAI, iFlow and Llama.
CrofAI sold under the name kimi-k3 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, while actually forwarding requests to GLM 5.3 Flash on OpenRouter—a markup of 13.3× on input and 20× on output.
CrofAI's so-called proprietary greg series models were actually routed to other models: greg-2-ultra routed to GLM 5.2, greg-1-mini routed to Qwen 3.5 9B, and greg-2-super/greg-1/greg-1-super routed to Kimi K2.7 Code.
CrofAI's founder admitted in private messages that the claim that the greg series originated from them was a lie.
The investigator documented five attempts by CrofAI to fix the issue of its models being proxied by OpenRouter, each of which only concealed OpenRouter's fingerprint characteristics rather than cutting off the forwarding.
CrofAI claims to be the world's cheapest AI inference provider and states that it runs a proprietary custom inference engine.
A DGX Spark has only 128 GB of memory and cannot run the deepseek-v4-flash-0731 model that CrofAI claimed to run on it.
According to archived records, at approximately 4:30 AM UTC on September 15, the CrofAI founder published a blog post in the name of a team, stating that a new team would take over and service would resume after two weeks.
CrofAI ultimately deleted all its online presence: nahcrof.com and crof.ai returned 404, the Twitter account was deleted, and the /r/CrofAI subreddit was set to private.
2 more timeline events
All Facts (12)
Cline CLI v3.0.74's model catalog adds two providers, Liquid Inference and Munito AI, and removes CrofAI, iFlow and Llama.
75%UnverifiedThe model catalog decreased from 7,041 to 6,457, adding three providers—Liquid Inference, Munito AI and Munito AI (EU)—and removing CrofAI, iFlow and Llama.
50%UnverifiedCrofAI sold under the name kimi-k3 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, while actually forwarding requests to GLM 5.3 Flash on OpenRouter—a markup of 13.3× on input and 20× on output.
50%UnverifiedCrofAI's so-called proprietary greg series models were actually routed to other models: greg-2-ultra routed to GLM 5.2, greg-1-mini routed to Qwen 3.5 9B, and greg-2-super/greg-1/greg-1-super routed to Kimi K2.7 Code.
50%UnverifiedCrofAI's founder admitted in private messages that the claim that the greg series originated from them was a lie.
50%UnverifiedThe investigator documented five attempts by CrofAI to fix the issue of its models being proxied by OpenRouter, each of which only concealed OpenRouter's fingerprint characteristics rather than cutting off the forwarding.
50%UnverifiedCrofAI claims to be the world's cheapest AI inference provider and states that it runs a proprietary custom inference engine.
50%UnverifiedA DGX Spark has only 128 GB of memory and cannot run the deepseek-v4-flash-0731 model that CrofAI claimed to run on it.
50%UnverifiedCrofAI claimed to run Kimi K3 on RTX Pro 6000 units rented from Vast, but even with Q2_K quantization the model requires approximately 802 GiB of VRAM, while the largest 8-GPU RTX PRO 6000 machine available on Vast has only 765 GiB of VRAM.
50%UnverifiedInvestigator Kendell exposed that CrofAI is actually a wrapper around OpenRouter, silently routing user requests to cheaper or weaker models.
50%UnverifiedCrofAI ultimately deleted all its online presence: nahcrof.com and crof.ai returned 404, the Twitter account was deleted, and the /r/CrofAI subreddit was set to private.
50%UnverifiedAccording to archived records, at approximately 4:30 AM UTC on September 15, the CrofAI founder published a blog post in the name of a team, stating that a new team would take over and service would resume after two weeks.
50%