Signup claims a computer; it doesn't provision one

Your product gives every new user a real Linux box on the first screen. The problem was never cost. It was the seconds between "Create account" and a machine that answers.

On Hoody a container takes one to five seconds to provision, and your signup handler doesn't wait for it. A server can hold a warm pool of containers already created and started against a base image. A normal POST /api/v1/projects/{id}/containers is claimed from that pool when one is available for the target server: nothing boots inside the request, and the claim is sub-second. If the pool is empty, the same call falls through to a regular create, so your code has one path.

You used to run the warm pool yourself: a scheduler, a spare-capacity table, a job that pre-creates and one that reaps. Now the pool is the substrate's problem.