What 1 billion Muse tokens actually buys (measured from real usage)

Token allowances are abstract until you burn through them. I tracked my own Muse usage for a full week, so here is what the numbers mean in practice: what the free tier covers, what eats tokens fast, and when paying actually makes sense.

The tiers, plainly

Muse has 3 tiers. The features are the same on all of them. You are only buying weekly usage.

1. Free: $0. Up to 100 million tokens a week, refreshed weekly.
2. Power: $20 a month. 500 million tokens a week.
3. Maximum: $100 a month. 3 billion tokens a week.

The free tier figure comes from Mark Zuckerberg's launch post. The paid figures come from Meta's own subscription pages. Meta does not publish what a single task costs in tokens, so everything below is measured from my own meter, not from their docs.

What I actually burn

I run background agents around the clock. Research sweeps, monitoring jobs, long unattended runs. My measured burn is 560 to 580 million tokens a day. That is 3.9 to 4 billion tokens a week.

Read that against the tiers. My weekly burn is about 39 times the free allowance. It is about 8 times the Power allowance. It even exceeds the Maximum allowance of 3 billion a week.

I am not a normal user. I am the extreme case, and I know it. But the extreme case is useful, because it shows exactly where the tiers break.

What the free tier covers

For a normal person, 100 million tokens a week is generous. It covers a few agent tasks a day: planning, errands, research, drafting. Short interactive sessions sip tokens. If you use Muse the way most people use a chatbot, with a few delegated tasks mixed in, you will likely never touch the ceiling.

For comparison, this is the most generous free agent tier among the big labs right now. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all gate their free tiers harder. That is not marketing. It is just the published numbers side by side.

What burns tokens fast

Two things eat tokens an order of magnitude faster than chatting.

First, background agents. An agent working while you sleep does not stop to think about cost. Every page it reads, every tool call it makes, every retry after a failure, all of it meters. One overnight research sweep can burn more than a week of casual chat.

Second, long unattended jobs. Anything that runs for hours, fans out across subtasks, or retries on failure. My 580 million token days are almost entirely this: agents running while I am asleep or at work.

Rule of thumb from my meter: interactive use sips, autonomous use gulps. If your usage is mostly you asking questions and reading answers, the free tier will feel unlimited. The moment you set agents loose on schedules, watch the meter.

When paying makes sense

Do not pay before you hit the free cap at least once. The meter in the app warns you as you approach it, so you will know.

If you hit the cap regularly, Power at $20 a month gives you 5 times the free allowance. That covers heavy daily use and longer agent runs.

If you run agents overnight or keep several going at once, that is what Maximum is for. 3 billion a week is 30 times the free tier. Even at my burn rate, it covers most weeks.

One honest caveat: neither paid tier fixes the things that are not about tokens. Region limits, one Gmail account per connector, approvals that wait on you. Those are the same on every tier.

The takeaway

Invite codes grant 1 billion tokens, one time. That is roughly 10 weeks of the free allowance in a single grant. For a normal user, that is months of not thinking about the meter. For someone like me, it is under 2 days of burn, which tells you how far apart normal use and extreme use really are.

If you get a code, redeem it within 48 hours of joining. Join at muse.ai/join, then Settings, then Redeem Code. Miss the window and the tokens are gone. Mine is ZL1YRX, if you want it.

The broader point stands without any code: measure your own usage for a week before you pay for anything. The free tier is bigger than it looks, and the meter will tell you exactly which kind of user you are.