Baseten Launches joey-1: A 2B Decision Model at $0.01 per 1M Tokens

Baseten has released joey-1, a 2-billion parameter model purpose-built for classification, routing, and decision tasks in agentic pipelines, priced at $0.01 per 1M tokens — an extremely competitive price point for high-frequency inference use cases. The model is optimized for binary and multi-class decisions rather than generation, making it well-suited as a lightweight orchestration layer that routes tasks to more expensive frontier models only when necessary. For developers building cost-sensitive agentic systems, joey-1 represents a practical tool for reducing overall inference spend by handling routing, filtering, and intent classification cheaply. The 2B parameter footprint also enables low-latency responses that are critical in real-time pipeline architectures. This release reflects a maturing agentic infrastructure market where specialized small models are competing on task-specific efficiency rather than general capability.