Which Muse Are You Looking For?
Three unrelated products answer to the name "Muse" right now, and the confusion is not your fault: the muse.ai domain genuinely changed hands in 2026. The independent video company that held it rebranded to Skiv, and Meta's consumer AI agent now lives at that address.
Here is the whole disambiguation in one table.
| If you searched | You probably want | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| muse.ai, video hosting | Skiv | Independent video hosting and search company, renamed 3 March 2026 |
| Meta Muse, muse.ai today | Muse | Meta's personal AI agent, launched 8 September 2026 |
| Microsoft Muse | WHAM | A 2025 gameplay generation research model, no link to Meta |
The middle row is the one most people arrive at, and it is the one with a public model API attached. If that is where you landed, the cost question and the credits question are both answered below, and AI Perks tracks the credit programs Meta does not run.
What Happened to muse.ai: The Skiv Rebrand
muse.ai was a video hosting and search company founded by Antonio Roldao. It rebranded to Skiv on 3 March 2026 and gave customers until 10 March to migrate their embed URLs.
That one week window is why the internet still has stale references. Pages, docs and help articles written before March 2026 point at a brand that no longer uses the name, and search engines have been slow to catch up.
Meta subsequently took over the vacated muse.ai domain and uses it as the web front end for its agent. So a link to muse.ai written in 2025 and a link to muse.ai written today point at two completely different companies.
If you are looking for the video product, the name to search is Skiv. If you are looking for Meta's agent, the name to search is Meta Muse, because searching muse.ai alone still returns years of results about the old company alongside the new one.
What Meta Muse Actually Does
Muse is Meta's flagship consumer AI agent, released 8 September 2026 by Meta Superintelligence Labs under chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. It proactively completes tasks rather than only answering questions: booking, filling forms, sending emails and making purchases.
The architecture is the interesting part. Muse runs on a Meta-cloud virtual machine with a visible browser, so you watch the agent work instead of trusting a black box. Its permissions layer is called Sentinel, the component that sits between the agent and the actions it is allowed to take on your behalf.
Availability at launch:
- iOS and Android apps
- Web, at muse.ai
- AI glasses, listed as "coming soon"
One honest caveat: Meta has not published a task or token ceiling for the free tier. Several third-party write-ups quote specific limits. None of those numbers appear in Meta's own material, so treat them as unverified.
How Meta Built the Muse Stack in Five Months
Meta put out six Muse milestones between April and September 2026, moving from a single foundation model to a full consumer agent in five months.
| Date, 2026 | Release | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 8 | Muse Spark | The foundation model |
| Jul 7 | Muse Image | Image generation |
| Jul 9 | Muse Spark 1.1 and Meta Model API | Public preview, self-serve, OpenAI SDK compatible |
| Jul | Muse Video | Previewed |
| Aug 5 | Muse Code | A coding agent aimed at large codebases |
| Sep 8 | Muse | The flagship consumer personal AI agent |
The 9 July entry is the one that matters to builders. Making the Meta Model API self-serve and OpenAI SDK compatible means porting an existing integration is largely a base URL and key change rather than a rewrite. It is the same adoption tactic challenger APIs have leaned on before: remove the migration cost, and switching becomes an experiment instead of a project.
What Meta Muse Costs
The consumer app has a free tier, Power at $20 per month and Maximum at $100 per month. The tiers are differentiated by usage volume, not by features. That is unusual and worth noting: you are not locked out of capabilities by paying less, you just run out sooner.
API pricing from Meta's own developer docs:
| Product | Price |
|---|---|
| Muse Spark 1.1 / 1.2 / 1.3 input | $1.25 per million tokens |
| Muse Spark 1.1 / 1.2 / 1.3 output | $4.25 per million tokens |
| Contributor tier input | $0.10 per million tokens |
| Contributor tier output | $0.20 per million tokens |
| Muse Image | $0.01 per image |
| Muse Voice Transcribe | $3.00 per 1,000 minutes |
Run the numbers on a modest workload: 10 million input tokens and 2 million output tokens in a month costs $12.50 plus $8.50, so $21. That is cheap enough that pricing will not be what decides your architecture.
The Contributor tier is the line to read twice. It is 12.5x cheaper on input and 21.25x cheaper on output, and the price is paid in data: Meta trains on your prompts and completions. For a personal side project that is a fair trade. For anything touching customer data, proprietary prompts or regulated content, it is not a pricing decision at all, it is a data governance one.
Are There Free Meta Muse Credits or a Startup Program?
No. Meta runs no dedicated Muse startup or credit program, and that absence is worth knowing before you plan a budget around it.
Meta's developer programs page lists two startup-facing programs: Meta Horizon Start and the Meta Horizon Creator Program. Both are VR and MR programs, unrelated to Muse, Muse Spark or the Meta Model API. Meta also runs a Llama Startup Program for its open-weight models, but whether that extends to Muse Spark is not stated anywhere in Meta's own material. Do not assume it does.
So the practical position for a founder is this: the Meta Model API is cheap, but you pay for every token from day one. Many of the major alternatives do run startup credit programs, and that difference is worth pricing in before you commit a stack.
| Layer of your stack | How the meter runs | Where credits exist |
|---|---|---|
| Frontier model APIs | Per token, from your first call | AI Perks |
| Compute, GPU and hosting | Per hour, used or idle | AI Perks |
| Meta Muse Spark | $1.25 / $4.25 per million tokens | No program published |
AI Perks tracks $7.7M in credits across 194 companies, which is the part of the market Meta is currently sitting out.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is muse.ai the same as Meta Muse?
Today, yes, the domain hosts Meta's agent. Historically, no. muse.ai was an independent video hosting and search company that rebranded to Skiv on 3 March 2026, and Meta took over the vacated domain afterwards. Old links and new links point at entirely different companies.
What happened to the original muse.ai video platform?
It is now called Skiv. The rebrand landed on 3 March 2026, with customers given until 10 March to migrate their embed URLs. The product itself did not disappear, only the name and the domain did, which is why stale references still circulate.
Is Microsoft Muse related to Meta Muse?
No connection whatsoever. Microsoft announced Muse in February 2025 as a gameplay generation research model, formally WHAM, built with Xbox Game Studios and Ninja Theory. It came out of a games research collaboration and has nothing to do with Meta. Meta's Muse is a consumer task agent released more than eighteen months later.
How much does Meta Muse cost?
The consumer app offers a free tier, Power at $20 per month and Maximum at $100 per month, separated by usage volume rather than features. On the API, Muse Spark runs $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with images at $0.01 each.
Does Meta offer free credits for Muse Spark?
No. Meta publishes no Muse credit or startup program. Its developer programs page lists only Meta Horizon Start and the Meta Horizon Creator Program, both VR and MR only. Competing providers do offer credits, and AI Perks tracks $7.7M across 194 companies.
Is the Meta Model API compatible with my existing OpenAI code?
Meta launched the Meta Model API in public preview on 9 July 2026 as self-serve and OpenAI SDK compatible, so migrating an existing integration is closer to a configuration change than a rewrite. Test your own workload before committing, since compatibility claims rarely cover every endpoint.
Three products, one name, and only one of them is Meta's. Cover the rest of your stack at getaiperks.com.