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Why you should not pay for idle
Per-hour billing punishes the bursty, unpredictable shape of agent workloads. Here is the case for paused sandboxes that cost nothing and resume in milliseconds.
Sandal Engineering5 min read
Agent workloads are spiky by nature. A run may think for a minute, execute for four seconds, then wait on a human for an hour. Billing that by wall-clock hour charges almost entirely for waiting.
Pause is the default
A paused sandbox holds its full filesystem and memory image at storage cost only. Resuming restores the same process tree, so the agent picks up mid-task rather than rebuilding context from scratch.
That single decision is most of the 70–90% cost gap against per-hour providers — not a discount, just a unit of billing that matches the shape of the work.