# Flex and Priority Service Tiers Now Available for Telnyx Inference

> Source: <https://telnyx.com/release-notes/inference-service-tiers>
> Published: 2026-09-18 12:00:00+00:00

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[Telnyx Inference](https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/inference/service-tiers) now offers Flex and Priority service tiers. Set `service_tier` on each request to trade latency against token cost, on the same models and the same synchronous API you already use.

`service_tier` to `flex`, `default`, or `priority` on Chat Completions and Responses requests. Omitting the field uses `GET /v2/ai/openai/models` lists `data[].service_tiers` per model. Not every model supports every tier, and the models API is the source of truth.
Interactive and background workloads compete for the same serving capacity, and until now price was the only lever. Service tiers make the tradeoff explicit: Priority keeps conversational turns fast on Kimi K2.6 for workloads where a late response breaks the experience, and Flex runs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at lower rates for work where a few minutes of latency costs nothing. Both tiers run on Telnyx-hosted models, so you change one field in the request body rather than adding a second inference provider.

```
curl https://api.telnyx.com/v2/ai/openai/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TELNYX_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash",
    "service_tier": "flex",
    "messages": [
      {"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this support note in one sentence: The customer could not sign in. Resetting the password restored access."}
    ]
  }'
```

`Retry-After` when present.
**Learn more** in the [Inference service tiers docs](https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/inference/service-tiers) or the [Inference pricing page](https://telnyx.com/pricing/inference-api).