User charged $1,600 for idle containers on OpenAI's new Agents API
Wide-Arugula3042 · reddit · 2026-09-19
A user shares a costly gotcha with OpenAI's new Agents API: his recurring multi-step jobs each created a new container (session) that sat idle after 5 minutes of work — 138 containers in total, kept around as a trace history. He monitored token usage (about $0.20 per run after switching to Luna) but missed that container billing lands DAYS later.
Result: usage showed over $200 one morning, then spiked past $1,600. His warning: do not let containers (sessions) sit idle.
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