How much does an idle m5a.4xlarge cost on AWS?
An m5a.4xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $324/mo at its cheapest listed region (ap-south-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $96/mo — a $228/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.4440/hr
ap-south-1
Running 24/7
$324/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$228/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ap-south-1 Cheapest | $0.4440/hr | $0.2309/hr | ≈ $324/mo |
| us-east-1 | $0.6880/hr | $0.3165/hr | ≈ $502/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.6880/hr | $0.2821/hr | ≈ $502/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.6880/hr | $0.3234/hr | ≈ $502/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.7680/hr | $0.4531/hr | ≈ $561/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.8320/hr | $0.4659/hr | ≈ $607/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.8640/hr | $0.5184/hr | ≈ $631/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.8640/hr | $0.4234/hr | ≈ $631/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.8960/hr | $0.4211/hr | ≈ $654/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $1.1040/hr | $0.4195/hr | ≈ $806/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $324/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $232/mo | -$93/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $96/mo | -$228/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the m5a family
M5a swaps Intel for AMD EPYC at the same general-purpose vCPU/memory ratio, typically at a modest discount over M5 for comparable throughput. It shows up under the same workloads — app servers, internal tools, mid-size databases — usually chosen by teams optimizing spend without changing architecture. Those savings evaporate fast if the box runs unattended: a discounted instance idling 16 hours a day is still a discounted instance you didn't need.
Regional pricing varies: m5a.4xlarge runs $0.4440/hr in ap-south-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $1.1040/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 60% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
Common questions
How much does an idle m5a.4xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (ap-south-1), an m5a.4xlarge costs $0.4440/hr, or about $324/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 $228/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $93/mo (29%).
When does m5a make sense over m5?
When you want the same balanced vCPU-to-memory shape at a modest discount and your workload has no Intel-specific dependencies. Staging environments and internal tools rarely notice the difference. As with every discounted family, the discount only compounds if the instance is not also idling around the clock.
Other m5a 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.