How much does an idle p3.8xlarge cost on AWS?
A p3.8xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $8,935/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $2,659/mo — a $6,276/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$12.2400/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$8,935/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$6,276/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $12.2400/hr | $1.8360/hr | ≈ $8,935/mo |
| us-east-2 | $12.2400/hr | $1.9584/hr | ≈ $8,935/mo |
| us-west-2 | $12.2400/hr | $3.4272/hr | ≈ $8,935/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $13.2200/hr | $2.9084/hr | ≈ $9,651/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $15.2920/hr | $11.3161/hr | ≈ $11,163/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $16.7760/hr | $5.8716/hr | ≈ $12,246/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $16.9360/hr | $16.9360/hr | ≈ $12,363/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $16.9360/hr | $9.3148/hr | ≈ $12,363/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $8,935/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $6,382/mo | -$2,553/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $2,659/mo | -$6,276/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the p3 family
P3 carries NVIDIA V100 GPUs built for serious distributed training and HPC — the kind of instance a team rents by the hour for a training run. The waste here is subtle: the run finishes, everyone moves on, and the multi-GPU box keeps billing at anywhere from three to twenty-five dollars an hour depending on size because nobody circled back to stop it.
Regional pricing varies: p3.8xlarge runs $12.2400/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $16.9360/hr in ap-southeast-1, the priciest — a 28% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, p3.16xlarge (64 vCPU / 488 GB RAM), costs about $17,870/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than p3.8xlarge's ~$8,935/mo — for 2x the vCPU. It also steps up to 8 GPUs from 4.
Common questions
How much does an idle p3.8xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a p3.8xlarge costs $12.2400/hr, or about $8,935/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 $6,276/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $2,553/mo (29%).
Is p3 still a reasonable choice against newer GPU families?
For new training work, mostly no — newer accelerators deliver more per dollar. p3 fleets persist because of CUDA version pins, reserved-instance commitments, and inertia. If one is still in your account, check its utilization first: a legacy GPU box idling between occasional runs is the most expensive kind of nostalgia.
Other p3 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.