How much does an idle g6.xlarge cost on AWS?
A g6.xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $588/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $175/mo — a $413/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.8048/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$588/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$413/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.8048/hr | $0.4104/hr | ≈ $588/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.8048/hr | $0.2656/hr | ≈ $588/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.8048/hr | $0.4748/hr | ≈ $588/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.9664/hr | $0.4542/hr | ≈ $705/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $1.0064/hr | $0.4026/hr | ≈ $735/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $1.0464/hr | $0.4500/hr | ≈ $764/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $1.1672/hr | $0.5486/hr | ≈ $852/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $1.3680/hr | $0.3830/hr | ≈ $999/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $588/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $420/mo | -$168/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $175/mo | -$413/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.xlarge runs $0.8048/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $1.3680/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, g6.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $714/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 21% more than g6.xlarge's ~$588/mo — for 2x the vCPU. GPU count stays the same (1).
Common questions
How much does an idle g6.xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a g6.xlarge costs $0.8048/hr, or about $588/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 $413/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $168/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.