How much does an idle g6.2xlarge cost on AWS?
A g6.2xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $714/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $212/mo — a $501/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.9776/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$714/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$501/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.9776/hr | $0.5279/hr | ≈ $714/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.9776/hr | $0.2835/hr | ≈ $714/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.9776/hr | $0.5670/hr | ≈ $714/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $1.1739/hr | $0.4343/hr | ≈ $857/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $1.2225/hr | $0.4523/hr | ≈ $892/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $1.2711/hr | $0.5211/hr | ≈ $928/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $1.4178/hr | $0.6947/hr | ≈ $1,035/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $1.6617/hr | $0.3988/hr | ≈ $1,213/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $714/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $510/mo | -$204/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $212/mo | -$501/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the g6 family
G6 uses NVIDIA's current-generation L4 GPUs for the best price-performance in the inference and graphics tier, increasingly the default for new ML-serving and rendering environments. Being newest, these instances are the least likely to have inherited a shutdown schedule, so fresh g6 dev and staging boxes routinely start life running 24/7.
Regional pricing varies: g6.2xlarge runs $0.9776/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $1.6617/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, g6.4xlarge (16 vCPU / 64 GB RAM), costs about $966/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 35% more than g6.2xlarge's ~$714/mo — for 2x the vCPU. GPU count stays the same (1).
Common questions
How much does an idle g6.2xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g6.2xlarge costs $0.9776/hr, or about $714/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 $501/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $204/mo (29%).
Is g6 cheaper to run than g4dn for inference?
Per unit of inference work, usually yes — the L4 delivers considerably more throughput per dollar than the T4 at a moderately higher hourly rate. For always-on production serving that efficiency compounds; for a dev box used a few hours a day the hourly rate dominates, and a stopped g4dn is still cheaper than a running g6.
Other g6 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.