Idlebox launched a $0 paused tier. Quantum Billing billed every paused sandbox as running whenever someone checked it.

“We made pausing free. Quantum Billing bills a paused sandbox as running if anyone looks at it. Our customers look at it constantly.” Tomasz Wierzbicki, VP Growth, Idlebox

Idlebox rents micro-VM sandboxes to AI agents. An agent starts a box, waits on the model for 40 seconds, then runs a command for two.

Wall-clock billing charged for the wait. Tomasz's fix was a packaging change: a $0 paused state that keeps memory, files and processes, active seconds billed by the second, and one unit buyers could compare, the small sandbox.

Quantum Billing models each sandbox as paused and running at once until observed. The Idlebox dashboard observes, so every refresh moved part of the fleet to running. Customers on the new tier were billed for both states.

The small sandbox unit is defined when the pricing page renders. Each load picked a different size, so the published comparison chart changed its unit on every view.

Then came the side effect in public. Competitors posted their own charts, readers asked what a small sandbox is, and each answer re-rendered the chart.