Meta opens a paid developer API for its Muse Spark 1.1 reasoning model

Meta put one of its own models behind a paid developer API for the first time on July 9, 2026, opening a US-only preview of Muse Spark 1.1 through the new Meta Model API.

Muse Spark 1.1 is a multimodal reasoning model from Meta Superintelligence Labs built for agentic tasks, tool use, computer use and coding, with a 1-million-token context window and active context compaction, according to Meta’s announcement.

The preview undercuts rivals on price. Meta set the API at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, and gives developers $20 in free credits before switching them to pay-as-you-go billing. The European Union is not included at launch.

The move is a strategy shift for a company that built its reputation on releasing open-weight Llama models for free. Selling metered access to a frontier model puts Meta in direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic on the same commercial terms it once avoided. Named early API partners include the coding tools Replit and Cline and the content platform Box.

Meta has not published independent benchmarks for Muse Spark 1.1, so its performance against rival models rests on the company’s own description. The preview is also gated to the United States, leaving EU developers and the region’s regulatory questions to a later date.

Whether Meta extends the API beyond the US preview will signal how far it intends to take a paid-model business alongside its open-weight releases.