How much does an idle g5.12xlarge cost on AWS?
A g5.12xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $4,141/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $1,232/mo — a $2,908/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$5.6720/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$4,141/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$2,908/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $5.6720/hr | $2.7793/hr | ≈ $4,141/mo |
| us-east-2 | $5.6720/hr | $2.2121/hr | ≈ $4,141/mo |
| us-west-2 | $5.6720/hr | $2.6091/hr | ≈ $4,141/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $6.3317/hr | $3.0392/hr | ≈ $4,622/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $6.8109/hr | $4.0184/hr | ≈ $4,972/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $7.0928/hr | $3.4046/hr | ≈ $5,178/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $7.3747/hr | $1.9174/hr | ≈ $5,384/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $8.2261/hr | $3.7017/hr | ≈ $6,005/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $9.6413/hr | $5.3991/hr | ≈ $7,038/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $4,141/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $2,958/mo | -$1,183/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $1,232/mo | -$2,908/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the g5 family
G5 steps up to NVIDIA A10G GPUs, aimed at heavier ML inference, mid-size training, and graphics workloads that outgrow the T4. Teams reach for it when a g4dn box stops keeping up, but the usage pattern doesn't change: active during working hours, fully idle the rest of the week — and at a higher hourly rate, every idle hour costs more.
Regional pricing varies: g5.12xlarge runs $5.6720/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $9.6413/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 41% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, g5.16xlarge (64 vCPU / 256 GB RAM), costs about $2,990/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 28% less than g5.12xlarge's ~$4,141/mo — for 1.3x the vCPU. Note the trade: it carries 1 GPU versus 4 on the g5.12xlarge — cheaper only if your work isn't GPU-bound.
Common questions
How much does an idle g5.12xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g5.12xlarge costs $5.6720/hr, or about $4,141/mo if it runs 24/7. That's the on-demand list price — an idle instance costs exactly the same as a busy one, since cloud billing doesn't know the difference.
How much can I save by scheduling it off outside work hours?
Restricting it to business hours only (10×5) saves about $2,908/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $1,183/mo (29%).
When is g5 worth the premium over g4dn?
When the model or batch size outgrows the T4's 16 GB of GPU memory or its throughput — the A10G raises GPU memory to 24 GB and roughly doubles the compute. If a g4dn box is merely slow at training runs you do twice a week, scheduling beats upgrading: premium hardware only pays for itself while it is actually busy.
Other g5 sizes
Stop paying for idle AWS 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 for Linux instances and exclude storage, network, data transfer, and any negotiated or volume discounts. Actual bills vary by usage and account-level pricing. Prices as of 2026-07-20. Spot figures are indicative — AWS values are derived from AWS's published typical savings vs on-demand for the region; GCP values are the listed Spot price. Spot capacity can be reclaimed by the provider. Stopping preserves EBS and persistent-disk volumes; data on local instance-store or local-SSD drives does not survive a stop.