Cloud instance idle costs
An idle server costs exactly the same as a busy one — cloud billing doesn't know the difference. We priced 117 AWS and Google Cloud instance types at their cheapest listed region, both running 24/7 and scheduled off outside work hours, so you can see the real monthly cost — and the savings — before you provision anything.
AWS
83 instance types across 18 families, priced and broken down by region.
Browse AWS instance costs →Google Cloud
34 instance types across 7 families, priced and broken down by region.
Browse Google Cloud instance costs →Commonly looked-up instance types
Monthly cost at each type's cheapest listed region, running non-stop versus running business hours only (50 hours a week). Every type below has its own page with a full region breakdown, plus typical spot pricing where the provider publishes it.
| Instance type | Specs | 24/7 | Business hours | Saved / mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| t3.medium AWS | 2 vCPU · 4 GB | $30 | $9 | $21 |
| t3.large AWS | 2 vCPU · 8 GB | $61 | $18 | $43 |
| m5.large AWS | 2 vCPU · 8 GB | $70 | $21 | $49 |
| m5.xlarge AWS | 4 vCPU · 16 GB | $140 | $42 | $98 |
| m5.2xlarge AWS | 8 vCPU · 32 GB | $280 | $83 | $197 |
| c5.xlarge AWS | 4 vCPU · 8 GB | $124 | $37 | $87 |
| c6i.2xlarge AWS | 8 vCPU · 16 GB | $248 | $74 | $174 |
| r5.xlarge AWS | 4 vCPU · 32 GB | $184 | $55 | $129 |
| m7i.large AWS | 2 vCPU · 8 GB | $74 | $22 | $52 |
| g4dn.xlarge AWS | 4 vCPU · 16 GB · 1 GPU | $384 | $114 | $270 |
| g5.xlarge AWS | 4 vCPU · 16 GB · 1 GPU | $734 | $219 | $516 |
| p3.2xlarge AWS | 8 vCPU · 61 GB · 1 GPU | $2,234 | $665 | $1,569 |
| e2-standard-2 GCP | 2 vCPU · 8 GB | $49 | $15 | $34 |
| e2-standard-4 GCP | 4 vCPU · 16 GB | $98 | $29 | $69 |
| e2-standard-8 GCP | 8 vCPU · 32 GB | $196 | $58 | $137 |
| n2-standard-4 GCP | 4 vCPU · 16 GB | $142 | $42 | $100 |
| n2-standard-8 GCP | 8 vCPU · 32 GB | $284 | $84 | $199 |
| c2-standard-8 GCP | 8 vCPU · 32 GB | $305 | $91 | $214 |
| n1-standard-4 GCP | 4 vCPU · 15 GB | $139 | $41 | $97 |
| e2-highmem-4 GCP | 4 vCPU · 32 GB | $132 | $39 | $93 |
Not the type you were looking for? Browse all AWS instance costs or Google Cloud instance costs.
How these numbers are calculated
Every figure starts from the provider's published on-demand hourly rate for Linux instances — no reserved-instance, savings-plan, or committed-use discount is applied. A month is 730 hours, the same convention AWS and Google Cloud use on their own pricing pages, so a 24/7 monthly cost is simply the hourly rate times 730.
The comparison column assumes the machine runs only during business hours — 50 of the 168 hours in a week. That is a 70% reduction in running hours, and because Linux compute is billed per second while a machine is running, the cost falls by the same proportion. Stopping a machine does not stop its disk charges, which is why storage sits outside these numbers.
Each instance page quotes the cheapest region we track for that type, alongside a full per-region table and typical spot pricing where the provider publishes it. Regions differ by a wide margin — the same type can cost noticeably more in São Paulo or Tokyo than in Northern Virginia — so compare within the region you actually deploy to.
Calculate your own savings
Prefer to work from your own fleet numbers instead of a single instance type? Use one of the calculators below.
Stop paying for idle cloud servers
Idlefy runs a free audit of your fleet, then flips dev servers to stopped-by-default: lease one when you need it, and
when the lease ends it shuts itself off — stop, not terminate, persistent disks intact. Timers are set by your team, never
guessed, and Idlefy only manages instances tagged idlefy=enabled — on AWS that boundary is enforced by the IAM policy itself.
Prices are on-demand list price and exclude storage, network, data transfer, and any negotiated or volume discounts. Actual bills vary by usage and account-level pricing. Stopping preserves EBS and persistent-disk volumes; data on local instance-store or local-SSD drives — which several of the GPU types above carry — does not survive a stop. Prices as of 2026-07-20.