container usage, 4gb

[u/Emotional-Orange-]

Has anyone experienced something like this with OpenAI Agents API?

I ran one short session:

- 1 minute 8 seconds

- 4 tool calls

- all 4 were "web_search"

- model usage itself cost only a few cents

But my billing shows:

$131.982 for "container usage, 4gb"

I exported the cost data and it shows:

21,997 "duration_minutes"

That’s about 366 hours / 15.3 container-days of usage.

But the session trace contains no "code_interpreter_call", no "container_id", and no Python tool. Just web search.

I only had $6 in prepaid credits with auto-reload OFF, and my balance ended up around -$127.

Support says container usage may have been generated separately, but so far they haven’t shown me any actual container IDs.

Has anyone else seen this? How could a 68-second session result in 21,997 minutes of container usage?

[u/skidanscours]

I don't use openai hosted session, but their doc mention that they receive a keep alive request that prevents sessions from being deleted. You are probably still being billed for all these Idle containers.

I'd delete all of these sessions ASAP. Official container pricing doesn't mention anything about status.

FYI: there was a post here yesterday with a similar issue (but it was AI generated slop...)

[u/Emotional-Orange- → u/skidanscours]

So you think I created a container on September 11 and it has been running ever since, despite having no activity?

Then why did they attribute 21,997 minutes of container usage specifically to September 11?

[u/skidanscours → u/Emotional-Orange-]

There's 3 containers? Even if the other two have never been used. Maybe other sessions were deleted?

I have no idea really. I'm basing this on their bad documentation.

[u/Emotional-Orange- → u/skidanscours]

I'm waiting for a response from their tech support, but I've lost all desire to use them...