I'd like to start by saying that I am genuinely sorry, for everything from service instability to my own substantial misjudgement of the costs associated with running and scaling a service like crof.
crof is going to be changing to a purely pay-as-you-go pricing system. This time, I'd like to do it right. Let's start with what's changing: subscriptions.
Subscriptions are being removed
Subscriptions are going away entirely. Rather than reworking them myself, I put it to the community, and the decision was clear: remove subscriptions altogether and move fully to pay-as-you-go. Here are the results of that poll.
- These changes take effect at 17:00 (5:00 PM) CDT on May 31st.
- Subscriptions are being removed in favor of pure pay-as-you-go pricing.
- Existing subscriptions don't change immediately. You keep your current perks until the end of your billing period.
- Once your current period ends, your account simply moves to pay-as-you-go.
Lower pay-as-you-go pricing
There's good news, too. Pay-as-you-go pricing is getting lower, and model quality is improving. (All models that had a Q6 version and a -precision version have been replaced, and are now just Q8 quantization.) Here's the new pricing.
| Model | $ / M input | $ / M output | $ / M cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deepseek-v4-proQ8_0 | $0.40 | $0.80 | $0.003 |
| Deepseek-v4-pro-lightningQ8_0 | $0.80 | $1.60 | $0.02 |
| Mimo-v2.5-proQ8_0 | $0.40 | $0.80 | $0.003 |
| Kimi-k2.6int4 | $0.50 | $1.99 | $0.05 |
| Glm-5.1Q8_0 | $0.45 | $2.25 | $0.08 |
Prices are per million tokens. Mimo-v2.5-pro is priced identically to Deepseek-v4-pro.
What actually happened
For anyone who wants the full story, here's what led to all of this. We'll start April 28th. Revenue that day was $822, cost was ~$380. April 29th, cost was ~$400, revenue was $470. The 30th was $664 in revenue but costs were $500. This was the consistent trend until May 9th. Costs were increasing, but revenue was generally ahead. Then May 9th was my first reality check: revenue was $395, costs were ~$800. Jumping to May 12th, revenue was $812 but costs were ~$855, and starting May 14th costs were consistently above $1,000. Revenue bounced between $1k/day and $500/day and everywhere in between, while costs stayed above $1,000.
Daily revenue vs. cost
April 28 to May 14, 2026. From May 14th onward, daily cost stayed consistently above $1,000 while revenue varied between roughly $500 and $1,000 per day.
Obviously this is something I could've probably seen coming if I'd done more analytics analysis, or paid attention in more places than just revenue each day and cost each day. Admittedly, this is my fault.
Thank you
Thank you for sticking with crof through all of this. I know these changes aren't what anyone hoped for, but they're what keep the service alive, and let me keep improving it (cheaper pay-as-you-go pricing and better models included). If you have questions, please reach out on Discord.
Questions about the changes?
See the full breakdown on our pricing page, or come talk to us directly. We read everything.