Disclaimer: no AI was used whatsoever to write this post

Cautionary tale about chasing cheap tokens.

exposé: https://kendell.dev/blog/crofaifalse/

reaction by nahcrof, announcing the shutdown of the service: https://x.com/nahcrof/status/2099552389434900643 - now deleted, archive picture: https://i.imgur.com/teOQngH.png

NahCrofAI (crof.ai, nahcrof.com) was an inference provider which had all the latest models at the cheapest price, often significantly below the lowest alternative on OpenRouter. The owner claimed that they are running custom inference engines that allows them to offer tokens for dirt cheap, and other providers are suffering from "skill issues", that's why they are so expensive.

In reality:

• "CrofAI is an OpenRouter wrapper that silently routes to cheaper or weaker models than what you request"

• For example, expensive models like kimi-k3 are sold at $2/$10 in/out, but instead routed to GLM 5.3 Flash via OpenRouter, representing a 13.3x multiple on input, and 20x multiple on output

• CrofAI's "own model family" greg-2-ultra routes to GLM 5.2, greg-1-mini routes to Qwen 3.5 9B. greg-2-super, greg-1, greg-1-super routes to Kimi K2.7 Code. All of these at a significant markup compared to the actual model being served. CrofAI admits in DMs that his claims of the greg family being made by him is a lie.

• The person investigating details the 5 different attempts by CrofAI at fixing their models being served via OpenRouter after given a heads-up and a lengthy grace period. In all 5 attempts, the only change CrofAI made was attempts to hide the fingerprints of OpenRouter, while still serving models through them

• Other inconsistencies don't add up either: CrofAI claims to run Kimi K3 on RTX Pro 6000s rented via Vast. That model requires ~802GiB even at the lobotomy level quantization of Q2_K. The largest RTX PRO 6000 machine on Vast has only 8 of them, totaling 765GiB. He also claimed that for the purposes of "investigating" the "issue" of his API routing to OpenRouter, he will have deepseek-v4-flash-0731 running on his local DGX Spark. A Spark has 128GB memory, and is therefore unable to run that model.

CrofAI responded to the exposé by announcing the shutting down of their service; after their failure to provide their own inference, they promise to provide one last thing: a refund to those asking.

UPDATE

UPDATE: around 4:30 AM UTC of Sept 15, the owner published a now-deleted blog post (archive image) writing under the fake pretense that it's his "team" authoring it, stating all of CrofAI founder's claims "were written under a lot of stress, and they described the situation as worse it was", and that a new team is taking over, with the service being resumed in 2 weeks.

At the same time, the CrofAI twitter account was also supposedly "taken over" by the team, starting each twitter reply with "Hey, Nathan here", stating the founder is stepping back and a "team" is taking over everything. This fake pretense act only lasted a few hours, and scared either by the public not buying the Nth fake story of the pathological liar that CrofAI is, or by the public's replies reminding him that what he committed is numerous counts of wire fraud, he has now deleted all his online presence: nahcrof.com and crof.ai return 404, Twitter page is deleted, /r/CrofAI sub is now private.