How much does an idle g6.8xlarge cost on AWS?
A g6.8xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $1,471/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $438/mo — a $1,033/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$2.0144/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$1,471/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$1,033/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $2.0144/hr | $1.1079/hr | ≈ $1,471/mo |
| us-east-2 | $2.0144/hr | $0.7050/hr | ≈ $1,471/mo |
| us-west-2 | $2.0144/hr | $0.9468/hr | ≈ $1,471/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $2.4189/hr | $0.9917/hr | ≈ $1,766/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $2.5190/hr | $0.7305/hr | ≈ $1,839/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $2.6191/hr | $0.8905/hr | ≈ $1,912/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $2.9215/hr | $1.1394/hr | ≈ $2,133/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $3.4241/hr | $0.7875/hr | ≈ $2,500/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $1,471/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $1,050/mo | -$420/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $438/mo | -$1,033/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: g6.8xlarge runs $2.0144/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $3.4241/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, g6.12xlarge (48 vCPU / 192 GB RAM), costs about $3,359/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 128% more than g6.8xlarge's ~$1,471/mo — for 1.5x the vCPU. It also steps up to 4 GPUs from 1.
Common questions
How much does an idle g6.8xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g6.8xlarge costs $2.0144/hr, or about $1,471/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 $1,033/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $420/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.