v3.6.0: Bring Your CrofAI Key — Same $8 Harness, Direct OSS Billing
Critique BYOK now routes chat and sandbox PR review through CrofAI (nahcrof) or OpenRouter. Pay $8/month for the harness; pay Crof or OpenRouter for the tokens.
Crof + OpenRouter BYOK
$8 harness · models at your cost
critique.sh
When we shipped the $8/month BYOK harness in May, the story was simple: Critique runs the review system; OpenRouter bills the models. That lane still exists — and it is still the right choice if you want frontier GPT or Claude routes, transcription, or a single OpenRouter budget across tools.
A growing slice of teams does not need OpenRouter in the middle for every pass. They want direct OSS hosting: Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.1, MiMo, and Crof-native models like Greg 1 — billed by nahcrof/Crof at provider-native rates. v3.6.0 wires that path into the same product harness you already trust for sandbox review and chat.
Two providers, one harness plan
Bundled Solo / Pro / Team plans are unchanged. BYOK is a separate lane for teams that want direct provider invoices.
| Line item | Critique | Your provider | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harness (orchestration) | $8/mo USD · €8/mo EUR | $8/mo USD · €8/mo EUR | — |
| Model tokens (chat + sandbox review) | — | — | OpenRouter or CrofAI account |
| Typical upstream | E2B, OpenCode, GitHub App, retrieval | Same product stack | openrouter.ai or crof.ai/v1 |
| Best for | Predictable harness fee | Teams with existing OpenRouter spend | Teams optimizing OSS model cost on Crof |
Student/OSS ($5/mo) and bundled credit tiers (Solo $19, Pro $49, Team $149) are separate products. BYOK is for direct model billing with Critique orchestration.
How Crof routing works inside Critique
Critique’s model picker stays OpenRouter-shaped because policy, credits, and catalog docs were built around those ids. At request time we map known ids to Crof slugs — for example moonshotai/kimi-k2.6 becomes kimi-k2.6. That is why the in-app list can look narrower than Crof’s live catalog even though BYOK unlocks more OSS models on the provider side.
Frontier OpenAI and Anthropic models in Critique policy are not available on Crof’s OpenAI-compatible endpoint. If your review policy depends on those lanes, keep an OpenRouter key (or use bundled Team credits). Crof BYOK shines when your lead and specialist stack is OSS-first and you want nahcrof’s direct hosting economics.
Precedence when both keys are saved
If you save both Crof and OpenRouter keys, Crof takes precedence. That matches the typical intent: you added Crof because you want that billing path. Remove the Crof key in Settings and Critique falls back to OpenRouter BYOK automatically — no policy rewrite required.
Set up in five minutes
- 1Subscribe to the harness planOn Pricing, choose the $8/month BYOK harness (€8/mo in Europe). That covers Critique orchestration — not model tokens.
- 2Create a Crof API keySign in at ai.nahcrof.com, create a key, and set spend limits you are comfortable with.
- 3Save the key in CritiqueSettings → Bring your own CrofAI key → Save encrypted key. Keys never return to the browser after save.
- 4Optional: keep OpenRouter for frontierSave an OpenRouter key as fallback for GPT/Claude lanes. Remember Crof wins when both exist — remove Crof temporarily if you need a pure OpenRouter run.
- 5Verify UsageRun one chat turn and one sandbox PR review. Usage should show externally billed model calls with zero Critique credits on the BYOK path.
Wire your key and run a review
Open Settings to add Crof or OpenRouter, confirm the harness plan on Pricing, and read the full BYOK guide in docs.
Open Settings →