April 29, 2026 brought a small Claude Code update with big budget implications: the new ANTHROPIC_BEDROCK_SERVICE_TIER setting lets Bedrock users choose default, flex, or priority and sends that choice as the X-Amzn-Bedrock-Service-Tier header. The episode breaks down when each tier makes sense, why latency and throughput guarantees matter, and how to avoid overpaying for interactive and batch workloads.