Guide 05 · pause / resume / refresh
Long-running background agents that don't burn money
Research agents, monitoring agents, multi-hour builds: sessions run up to
24 hours on paid plans, extend live with refresh, and — the part that saves real
money — pause when idle so a waiting agent costs storage, not compute.
1
Give the agent a long leash
sb = Sandbox.create(template="python-3.11", timeout=86400) # 24 h
2
Extend mid-task when it needs more time
# POST /v1/sandboxes/{id}/timeout {"seconds": 21600} — 6 more hours from now # POST /v1/sandboxes/{id}/refresh — re-arm the TTL
3
Pause while waiting, resume on the trigger
$ pilldrops sandbox pause sb_agent1 # billing stops, filesystem stays # … webhook fires 3 hours later … $ pilldrops sandbox resume sb_agent1 # picks up exactly where it left off
paused sandboxes bill $0/s compute ·
lifecycle API