A powerful new AI model appeared on OpenRouter on 3 November 2026 with no company name attached — and it currently costs nothing to use. Crouton Alpha is a "stealth model": an unreleased model from an anonymous lab, listed under the model ID stealth/crouton-alpha. It offers a 1,048,576-token context window, accepts text, images, video, audio and files, and is priced at $0 for both input and output during its alpha preview. Try it on the official page: openrouter.ai/stealth/crouton-alpha.
What is Crouton Alpha?
OpenRouter describes Crouton Alpha as a lightweight model built for scalable coding, agentic and multimodal workflows. It is designed for the small, repeated steps inside AI agents — agentic sub-tasks, tool use and document analysis in high-volume, repeated work — and developers can pair it with a frontier reasoning model that plans while Crouton Alpha executes the bounded steps. OpenRouter is clear that it only routes requests to the model: Crouton Alpha "is developed and operated by a third-party provider who has chosen to remain anonymous during this preview," and OpenRouter "is not its developer, owner, or provider."
Crouton Alpha specs (verified on OpenRouter)
- Model ID: stealth/crouton-alpha
- Released: 3 November 2026
- Price: $0 per million input tokens and $0 per million output tokens — OpenRouter confirms you are not charged for prompt or completion tokens
- Context window: 1,048,576 tokens — the largest of any stealth model on OpenRouter
- Maximum output: up to 943,718 tokens (listing data reported by CellCog, 3 November 2026)
- Inputs: text, images, video, files such as PDFs, and audio
- Output: text only
- Tool calling: yes — accepts tools and tool_choice for function calling, plus structured outputs via a JSON schema in response_format
- API: OpenAI-compatible, via OpenRouter's unified API
How to try Crouton Alpha free — step by step
- Create a free OpenRouter account. Go to openrouter.ai and sign up or sign in. No payment is needed for this model, because its price is $0.
- Open the official model page. Visit https://openrouter.ai/stealth/crouton-alpha and confirm the listing still shows Free / $0 pricing and the 1,048,576-token context window before you build on it.
- Create an API key. In your OpenRouter account, open the Keys page and create a new API key. Copy it and keep it secret — you will send it as a Bearer token with every request.
- Point your client at OpenRouter. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible, so in most SDKs you only change the base URL to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 and swap in your OpenRouter key.
- Set the model ID. Use stealth/crouton-alpha as the model in your request. The model page also provides drop-in code for calling it.
- Send your first request. For example, with curl:
curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_OPENROUTER_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"model": "stealth/crouton-alpha", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise this document in five bullet points."}]}' - Test it on agent-style work. Try the jobs it is built for: summarising a long PDF, extracting data from a document, tagging and sorting text, or running a small tool-calling step inside a larger agent workflow.
One practical note: OpenRouter applies rate limits to free usage. Its documentation lists free models at 20 requests per minute and 50 requests per day, rising to 1,000 requests per day once an account has bought at least $10 in credits — so plan test batches accordingly.
Honest caveats before you rely on it
- Nobody knows who made it. The provider is anonymous. Community trackers have pointed to clues suggesting Meta's Muse family, but at least one fingerprint — token counts — does not match, and no maker has confirmed anything. Treat every identity claim as speculation.
- Your data goes to an unnamed provider. OpenRouter states: "Prompts and completions may be retained by the provider but are not used for training," with other use governed by its Stealth Model Terms. Do not send private, client or sensitive data to a model whose operator you cannot name.
- Alpha means it can change or disappear. Stealth previews are temporary by design. Earlier OpenRouter stealth models were later revealed under real names — and the free period ended when they were. Build nothing critical that depends on Crouton Alpha staying free, or staying available at all.
- No EU in-region routing. OpenRouter notes Crouton Alpha is "not currently available through EU in-region routing," and some regions are restricted, so availability depends on where you are.
- No official benchmarks yet. There are no published benchmark scores from the provider, so judge it on your own test tasks, not on hype.
Why Crouton Alpha matters
A free model with a million-token context window and multimodal input is rare. Most free tiers cap context far lower, which makes them useless for whole-codebase questions, long contracts, book-length documents or video and audio analysis. Crouton Alpha is aimed squarely at the economics of AI agents: agents repeat hundreds of small steps a day, and a fast, free model for those steps can cut the cost of an agent workflow dramatically while a stronger paid model handles the planning. It is also a live preview of where the market is heading — labs now test unreleased models in public, under code names, and collect real-world feedback before launch. Trying Crouton Alpha now is a free way to test that future on your own workloads — just keep sensitive data out of it, and do not build anything you cannot afford to lose when the alpha ends.
Sources: OpenRouter, Crouton Alpha official model page and Stealth models page (opened 6 November 2026); OpenRouter Quickstart documentation (opened 6 November 2026); CellCog, "What Is Crouton Alpha? OpenRouter's Stealth Model, Graded," 3 November 2026.
