How much does an idle g5.2xlarge cost on AWS?
A g5.2xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $885/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $263/mo — a $621/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$1.2120/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$885/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$621/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $1.2120/hr | $0.4606/hr | ≈ $885/mo |
| us-east-2 | $1.2120/hr | $0.4000/hr | ≈ $885/mo |
| us-west-2 | $1.2120/hr | $0.5212/hr | ≈ $885/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $1.3530/hr | $0.6088/hr | ≈ $988/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $1.4554/hr | $0.5530/hr | ≈ $1,062/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $1.5156/hr | $0.7123/hr | ≈ $1,106/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $1.5758/hr | $0.6776/hr | ≈ $1,150/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $1.7578/hr | $0.9492/hr | ≈ $1,283/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $2.0602/hr | $0.9477/hr | ≈ $1,504/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $885/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $632/mo | -$253/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $263/mo | -$621/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: g5.2xlarge runs $1.2120/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $2.0602/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, g5.4xlarge (16 vCPU / 64 GB RAM), costs about $1,186/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 34% more than g5.2xlarge's ~$885/mo — for 2x the vCPU. GPU count stays the same (1).
Common questions
How much does an idle g5.2xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g5.2xlarge costs $1.2120/hr, or about $885/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 $621/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $253/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.