Meta Opens Its First Paid Model API With Muse Spark 1.1

Meta on July 9 introduced Muse Spark 1.1 alongside a public preview of its new Meta Model API, the first time outside developers can pay to build on a Meta frontier model. The model, from Meta Superintelligence Labs, is a multimodal reasoning system with a one-million-token context window, tuned for tool and computer use, coding, and multimodal understanding.

The move is a strategy shift as much as a product. Meta established its reputation on downloadable Llama weights. A metered API at 1.25 dollars per million input tokens and 4.25 per million output tokens, with 20 dollars in starter credits, puts Meta on the same commercial basis as the closed labs it once positioned itself against. CNBC framed the launch as Meta pursuing Anthropic and OpenAI in coding specifically.

On Chamath Palihapitiya's price scale, Meta's list price sits well below the frontier US labs and well above the lowest Chinese prices, which positions Muse Spark as a mid-price agentic option rather than a premium reasoning model. The coding claims come from the vendor and await independent benchmark reproduction.