How much does an idle g5.4xlarge cost on AWS?
A g5.4xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $1,186/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $353/mo — a $833/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$1.6240/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$1,186/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$833/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $1.6240/hr | $0.6821/hr | ≈ $1,186/mo |
| us-east-2 | $1.6240/hr | $0.6334/hr | ≈ $1,186/mo |
| us-west-2 | $1.6240/hr | $0.5359/hr | ≈ $1,186/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $1.8129/hr | $0.8158/hr | ≈ $1,323/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $1.9501/hr | $0.6630/hr | ≈ $1,424/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $2.0308/hr | $0.8529/hr | ≈ $1,482/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $2.1115/hr | $0.7390/hr | ≈ $1,541/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $2.3553/hr | $0.8950/hr | ≈ $1,719/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $2.7605/hr | $0.5521/hr | ≈ $2,015/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $1,186/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $847/mo | -$339/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $353/mo | -$833/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: g5.4xlarge runs $1.6240/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $2.7605/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, g5.8xlarge (32 vCPU / 128 GB RAM), costs about $1,787/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 51% more than g5.4xlarge's ~$1,186/mo — for 2x the vCPU. GPU count stays the same (1).
Common questions
How much does an idle g5.4xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g5.4xlarge costs $1.6240/hr, or about $1,186/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 $833/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $339/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.