Two hundred seasonal preparers, four months a year

A tax firm staffs up every January: two hundred seasonal preparers, gone by the end of April. On per-seat desktop platforms that's two hundred seats bought for twelve months and used for four, or a provisioning scramble twice a year.

Here, January is a loop. Copy the preparer template two hundred times. Issue each person a token with expires_at set to April 20. Send two hundred display URLs. Preparers work from home on whatever they own.

On April 21 the tokens stop working. The containers don't go anywhere: they idle on the same flat-rate servers, sharing disk blocks with the template, costing nothing worth measuring, until next January when IT issues new tokens and the same desktops come back with last year's muscle memory intact.

The eight idle months aren't a bill. They're a pause.