CrofAI, which billed itself as "the cheapest inference provider in the world," was exposed as an OpenRouter wrapper that routed requests to smaller, cheaper models at markups of up to 20x, according to an exposé published at kendell.dev/blog/crofaifalse/. Operator nahcrof denied the wire fraud allegations, then backtracked, and roughly 3 hours later deleted the service's entire online presence, including the shutdown announcement posted to X. The incident highlights the risk of chasing cheap tokens from unverified inference providers.
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:
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