How many “containers” are used during a build with multiple docker images?

The docs don’t seem to spell this out, but if I have a job that requires a database, Redis, and elastic search, and I run these using docker, would that consume 1 container or 4 with regards to pricing?

Just one. The container limit applies to (parallelisable) build containers, not to any secondary Docker containers, and not to ones you spin up with Docker manually.