The warm container was already on your server

A user hits "run" in your agent product. They expect the sandbox now.

A fresh container takes one to five seconds to provision. For a chat UI that's a visible stall, so the usual fix is a warm pool: keep N sandboxes booted and ready. On platforms that meter by the minute, the pool is the most expensive thing you run, because it is by definition idle.

On Hoody, when a warm prespawn pool exists for your server, a normal create call is claimed from it instead of provisioned fresh, and the container is back in under a second. The warm containers sit on the server you already rent, burning no CPU, sharing their base image's blocks copy-on-write with everything else on the box. You wrote no pool manager. The flat rate didn't move.

Standby capacity on a flat-rate box is capacity, not a charge.