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Met the comand mamber of a new AI inference startup at a meetup tonight. Instead of just taking the pitch, I checked it myself before he'd even finished his talk.
The company is MoonMath.ai, the product is Zro — a CLI that lets you run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and a few other coding agents on cheaper open-weight models (DeepSeek, GLM-5.3, Kimi K3) instead of the usual providers. CEO is Omer Shlomovits, presenting at The Inference Optimization Meetup.
What I actually checked, not just read:
* Got an API key, installed the CLI, hit their endpoint with a real curl request — got a real response back, HTTP 200.
* Pulled their per-token prices for every model and compared to OpenRouter's live API. Three models: identical price. One model (Kimi K3): Zro is 2.4x cheaper than OpenRouter's listed rate.
* Their pricing page claims "$20/month ≈ 1B tokens." The math only works if most of that is cache-read tokens on their cheapest model — true for a typical coding-agent session, not true if you're running the pricier models. Not a lie, but an optimistic best case stated like a typical one.
* Their privacy page says "zero request retention, no training." Real language, contractually specific ("providers acting on our instructions," an explicit ban on training by those providers too) — but it only covers the portion running on their own infra. Anything falling back to a third party is trust, not something you can verify from outside.
* Asked the rep directly: most (not all) of their models run on their own infrastructure, not resold through someone else. Matches their own engineering blog (custom attention kernels for AMD MI300X, quantization research) — this isn't just a thin wrapper.
Verdict: not a scam. Prices are real, the product works, the team does real infra work. But "zero" anything in this space is never physically zero — it's always a chain of trust with a boundary somewhere, and it's worth knowing exactly where that boundary sits before you route real traffic
The company is MoonMath.ai, the product is Zro — a CLI that lets you run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and a few other coding agents on cheaper open-weight models (DeepSeek, GLM-5.3, Kimi K3) instead of the usual providers. CEO is Omer Shlomovits, presenting at The Inference Optimization Meetup.
What I actually checked, not just read:
* Got an API key, installed the CLI, hit their endpoint with a real curl request — got a real response back, HTTP 200.
* Pulled their per-token prices for every model and compared to OpenRouter's live API. Three models: identical price. One model (Kimi K3): Zro is 2.4x cheaper than OpenRouter's listed rate.
* Their pricing page claims "$20/month ≈ 1B tokens." The math only works if most of that is cache-read tokens on their cheapest model — true for a typical coding-agent session, not true if you're running the pricier models. Not a lie, but an optimistic best case stated like a typical one.
* Their privacy page says "zero request retention, no training." Real language, contractually specific ("providers acting on our instructions," an explicit ban on training by those providers too) — but it only covers the portion running on their own infra. Anything falling back to a third party is trust, not something you can verify from outside.
* Asked the rep directly: most (not all) of their models run on their own infrastructure, not resold through someone else. Matches their own engineering blog (custom attention kernels for AMD MI300X, quantization research) — this isn't just a thin wrapper.
Verdict: not a scam. Prices are real, the product works, the team does real infra work. But "zero" anything in this space is never physically zero — it's always a chain of trust with a boundary somewhere, and it's worth knowing exactly where that boundary sits before you route real traffic
