How much does an idle m7i.large cost on AWS?
An m7i.large billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $74/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $22/mo — a $52/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.1008/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$74/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$52/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.1008/hr | $0.0393/hr | ≈ $74/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.1008/hr | $0.0302/hr | ≈ $74/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.1008/hr | $0.0423/hr | ≈ $74/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.1061/hr | $0.0414/hr | ≈ $77/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.1124/hr | $0.0674/hr | ≈ $82/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.1207/hr | $0.0568/hr | ≈ $88/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.1260/hr | $0.0517/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.1260/hr | $0.0605/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.1302/hr | $0.0495/hr | ≈ $95/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.1606/hr | $0.0289/hr | ≈ $117/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $74/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $53/mo | -$21/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $22/mo | -$52/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the m7i family
M7i is the latest-generation Intel Sapphire Rapids general-purpose instance, with DDR5 memory and improved networking over M6i/M5. It's increasingly the default pick for new staging and integration environments that want current-generation performance without going compute- or memory-optimized. Being newest also means it's the least likely to have inherited an old shutdown schedule, so these environments frequently start life running 24/7 by default.
Regional pricing varies: m7i.large runs $0.1008/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.1606/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 37% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, m7i.xlarge (4 vCPU / 16 GB RAM), costs about $147/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than m7i.large's ~$74/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle m7i.large cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), an m7i.large costs $0.1008/hr, or about $74/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 $52/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $21/mo (29%).
Do dev environments need the newest generation like m7i?
The honest argument is parity with production rather than raw need: performance-test rigs should match prod hardware, and m7i increasingly is prod hardware. For everything else, an older generation on a tight schedule is cheaper than the newest one running around the clock.
Other m7i 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.