Crouton Alpha lands as OpenRouter’s free stealth model

Crouton Alpha is compelling as an inexpensive worker model for high-volume agent workflows, but its anonymity and unclear data-retention practices make production use premature.

• –Designed for repeated coding subtasks, tool calls, extraction, and document analysis rather than frontier-level planning
• –Million-token context and broad multimodal input make it unusually capable for a free preview
• –Meta clues include matching regional restrictions, effort settings, and behavioral fingerprints—but token-count mismatches weaken the identification
• –Prompts and completions may be retained by the unnamed provider, so sensitive data should stay out
• –Free stealth models often change pricing or disappear once their creators are revealed