Meta starts selling models directly with its first self-serve API
Muse Spark 1.1 is now in US public preview through the new Meta Model API, with $20 in free credits. The fourth hyperscaler just opened a direct till, at the bottom of the price sheet.
- Meta opened Muse Spark 1.1 to US developers in public preview through the new Meta Model API, the company's first paid, self-serve model access.
- Pricing holds at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output, with $20 in free credits for new users and a 1M-token context window.
- A successor model, codenamed Watermelon, is already in training.
The repricing week ended with a structural change, not just another number. Meta opened Muse Spark 1.1 to US developers in public preview through the new Meta Model API, the company announced. It is the first time Meta has sold model access directly, self-serve, with a credit card, rather than through partners or open weights.
The terms
Pricing holds at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output, the numbers that made Muse Spark the floor of the July 9 repricing. New users get $20 in free credits, the context window is 1M tokens, and the preview upgrades April's partner-only private preview into something any US developer can touch, per gHacks. Meta's AI chief called the pricing "very aggressive and attractive," aimed at a model that scales with high usage. A successor, codenamed Watermelon, is already in training.
Why the channel matters more than the price
Open weights built Meta goodwill but no revenue relationship. A self-serve API is a different animal: it puts Meta in the same checkout flow as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, and it makes the $1.25 price point a standing offer rather than a launch-day stunt. For agent operators, the build-versus-buy math changes at the margin where volume lives. High-throughput pipeline steps, the ones eating most of the token bill, now have a fourth vendor bidding for them, and the cheapest one comes with a hyperscaler's balance sheet behind it. The price of intelligence split in two directions last week; Meta just moved into the bottom lane and opened a till.