How much does an idle g5.xlarge cost on AWS?
A g5.xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $734/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $219/mo — a $516/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$1.0060/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$734/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$516/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $1.0060/hr | $0.4426/hr | ≈ $734/mo |
| us-east-2 | $1.0060/hr | $0.4225/hr | ≈ $734/mo |
| us-west-2 | $1.0060/hr | $0.5432/hr | ≈ $734/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $1.1230/hr | $0.5615/hr | ≈ $820/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $1.2080/hr | $0.5557/hr | ≈ $882/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $1.2580/hr | $0.6290/hr | ≈ $918/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $1.3080/hr | $0.6278/hr | ≈ $955/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $1.4590/hr | $0.7003/hr | ≈ $1,065/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $1.7100/hr | $0.3591/hr | ≈ $1,248/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $734/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $525/mo | -$210/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $219/mo | -$516/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.xlarge runs $1.0060/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $1.7100/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, g5.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $885/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 20% more than g5.xlarge's ~$734/mo — for 2x the vCPU. GPU count stays the same (1).
Common questions
How much does an idle g5.xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g5.xlarge costs $1.0060/hr, or about $734/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 $516/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $210/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.