Standby Requests

Send service_tier: "standby" and pay half price. Standby requests run on spare capacity: they’re deprioritized in the queue, and when a region is busy they shed a fast 429 instead of waiting. Built for batch and background workloads where a retry costs nothing.

Tier	Input per 1M	Cached input per 1M	Output per 1M
Default	$1.10	$0.22	$4.10
Standby	$0.55	$0.11	$2.05

Available on GLM-5.2 (morph-glm52-744b). Kimi K3 coming soon. Other models accept the field but bill at standard rates.

Quick Start

Python
TypeScript
cURL

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="YOUR_API_KEY",
    base_url="https://api.morphllm.com/v1",
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="morph-glm52-744b",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this diff: ..."}],
    service_tier="standby",
)

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: "YOUR_API_KEY",
  baseURL: "https://api.morphllm.com/v1",
});

const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "morph-glm52-744b",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Summarize this diff: ..." }],
  service_tier: "standby",
});

curl -X POST "https://api.morphllm.com/v1/chat/completions" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "morph-glm52-744b",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this diff: ..."}],
    "service_tier": "standby"
  }'

How it behaves

Accepted values: "auto", "default", "standby". Anything else is a 400. Omitting the field means default.
Standby is admitted only when the region has spare capacity. When it doesn’t, you get a fast 429 with Retry-After: 15: retry after the delay, or resend as default if you need it now.
Shed requests are never billed. You pay only for requests that run.
Prompt caching still applies, and cached standby input gets both discounts: $0.11/1M.
The response echoes the tier that served your request in its service_tier field.

When to use it

Standby fits work where nobody is waiting on the response: nightly batch jobs, eval runs, dataset generation, background summarization, re-indexing. It does not fit interactive traffic; under load your requests are the first to shed.

Pitfalls

Getting frequent 429s

Expected under load: standby runs on spare capacity. Honor Retry-After (15s) with a retry loop, or fall back to service_tier: "default" for the requests that can’t wait.

Higher latency than default

Standby requests sit behind default-tier traffic in the queue. If p95 latency matters, use the default tier.

Get Started

Models

API Reference

Integrations

Quick Start

How it behaves

When to use it

Pitfalls

See Also

​Quick Start

​How it behaves

​When to use it

​Pitfalls

​See Also

Quick Start

How it behaves

When to use it

Pitfalls

See Also