How much does an idle g5.8xlarge cost on AWS?
A g5.8xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $1,787/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $532/mo — a $1,255/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$2.4480/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$1,787/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$1,255/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $2.4480/hr | $1.0282/hr | ≈ $1,787/mo |
| us-east-2 | $2.4480/hr | $0.7589/hr | ≈ $1,787/mo |
| us-west-2 | $2.4480/hr | $0.9302/hr | ≈ $1,787/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $2.7327/hr | $1.2297/hr | ≈ $1,995/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $2.9396/hr | $1.0582/hr | ≈ $2,146/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $3.0612/hr | $1.1327/hr | ≈ $2,235/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $3.1829/hr | $1.0504/hr | ≈ $2,324/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $3.5503/hr | $1.3846/hr | ≈ $2,592/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $4.1611/hr | $0.7074/hr | ≈ $3,038/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $1,787/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $1,276/mo | -$511/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $532/mo | -$1,255/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: g5.8xlarge runs $2.4480/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $4.1611/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, g5.12xlarge (48 vCPU / 192 GB RAM), costs about $4,141/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 132% more than g5.8xlarge's ~$1,787/mo — for 1.5x the vCPU. It also steps up to 4 GPUs from 1.
Common questions
How much does an idle g5.8xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g5.8xlarge costs $2.4480/hr, or about $1,787/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 $1,255/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $511/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.