Crouton Alpha Is Free on OpenCode and OpenRouter

Crouton Alpha is a new stealth model, free on OpenCode and OpenRouter (opens in a new tab) for one week from November 3. Nobody has said who built it. It’s a lightweight model for high-volume, repeated agent work: sub-tasks, tool calls and document analysis. It has a 1M-token context window and takes text, images, audio, video and PDFs.

In OpenCode, run /models and pick Crouton Alpha. OpenCode says it’s limited to certain regions, so send one test request before you plan around it. In other harnesses like Pi or Command Code, add your OpenRouter API key and pick stealth/crouton-alpha.

How good is it? No benchmarks yet. OpenRouter pitches it as a worker, not a planner: a stronger model plans, and Crouton runs the small, bounded steps. Reliability is the early worry: at the time of writing, OpenRouter showed it serving requests successfully only about 36% of the time over the past 24 hours.

Budget impact: Free for about a week, until around November 10. Stealth models usually get claimed soon after, and the free price ends with the reveal, as it did when Space Bunny (opens in a new tab) became paid MiniMax M3.1 Flash. Your prompts aren’t used for training, but OpenRouter says the provider may keep them, so don’t send client code or secrets.

Verdict: worth testing this week, on cheap, repeatable work. Give it sub-tasks you can check fast, like summarizing files or extracting data. Keep a fallback model ready for when it errors out or the week ends. Check the OpenCode model list (opens in a new tab) and OpenRouter listing (opens in a new tab) for current terms.