Crouton Alpha: OpenRouter's free, anonymous 1M-context reasoning model
OpenRouter listed stealth/crouton-alpha on November 3: a free multimodal reasoning model from an undisclosed provider, with a 1,048,576-token context window, up to 943,718 output tokens, tool calling and structured outputs, aimed at high-volume repetitive agent subtasks.
Why it matters
Free during preview with frontier-scale context, already driving billions of tokens of early traffic from coding harnesses; the provider is unclaimed, with fingerprint clues pointing at Meta but explicitly unconfirmed.
What you could build with it
An indie developer building a codebase question-answering tool could route bulk summarisation and triage subtasks to Crouton Alpha for free while reserving a paid frontier model for final answers, cutting the cost of scanning large repos to near zero during the preview.
Does it hold up?
Too early to judge: free and already absorbing heavy harness traffic, but no published benchmarks, no named provider and no post-preview pricing, so production use should keep secrets out of prompts.
Built with Crouton Alpha
- OpenRouter launches free 1M-context multimodal stealth model Crouton Alphaashutoshai · Catalog details: six effort levels, median throughput around 52 tokens per second, and billions of tokens of early traffic from coding harnesses.
- A free stealth AI model called Crouton Alpha just matched Gemini's context windowstartupfortune · Notes the OpenRouter stealth-model playbook: earlier stealth models lost their free price once the preview ended, and no benchmarks have been published for Crouton.
- Use Crouton Alpha with OpenRouter API keytypingmind · Practical setup guide for calling stealth/crouton-alpha through the OpenRouter API in a chat client.
Learn more
First spotted on article: source.
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