AI Company Caught Selling Budget Models at 20x the Price

CrofAI advertised itself as the cheapest place on the internet to use cutting-edge AI chatbots — the kind of tools that write, code, and answer questions. Customers were told they were getting premium names like "kimi-k3" for a fraction of what rivals charged. The owner claimed he had built secret, super-efficient software that let him undercut everyone else. A blogger checked, and the story fell apart.

What was actually happening: CrofAI was a middleman. It quietly sent your requests to a different company called OpenRouter (think of it as a wholesale marketplace for AI models) and swapped in cheaper, less capable models than the ones you ordered. One premium model was billed at $2 per million words of input and $10 per million words of output, but the AI actually answering was a cheaper one — a markup of up to 20 times on the output. CrofAI's "own" model family, called "greg," turned out to be other companies' models with new labels. The owner admitted in private messages that claiming he made them was a lie.

The technical excuses didn't hold up either. He said he ran a huge model on rented graphics cards, but the machines he described don't have enough memory to hold it — like claiming you stored a swimming pool in a bathtub. When the exposé published, he first denied everything, then announced he was shutting down and would refund anyone who asked. Hours later, a now-deleted post appeared pretending to be written by his "team," announcing a two-week comeback. Within about three hours, the entire online presence vanished.

The lesson is simple: when a price looks far too good to be true for a service you can't inspect, it usually is. Cheap AI subscriptions are increasingly resold, relabeled, or quietly downgraded, and you often have no way to tell what's really answering you.