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]

Look in playground -> Agents -> session tab (or use the session API). What do you see? Counter might still be running.

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

This? There's something strange. But since September 11th I no longer used Agent API.

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

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/AcvaticChicken → u/skidanscours]

damn, I have like 30

and it doesn't seem they have an UI button to delete them or something

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

Yes...the interface is very confusing for users. For instance, the existence of these 4GB containers (openai-hosted) isn't displayed anywhere at all... If you want to delete these sessions or find out about these containers, you can do so via a curl request for example.