How much does an idle r5.large cost on AWS?
An r5.large billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $92/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $27/mo — a $65/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.1260/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$92/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$65/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.1260/hr | $0.0479/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.1260/hr | $0.0353/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.1260/hr | $0.0428/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.1300/hr | $0.0520/hr | ≈ $95/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.1410/hr | $0.0635/hr | ≈ $103/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.1510/hr | $0.0574/hr | ≈ $110/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.1520/hr | $0.0562/hr | ≈ $111/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.1520/hr | $0.0608/hr | ≈ $111/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.1520/hr | $0.0517/hr | ≈ $111/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.2010/hr | $0.0462/hr | ≈ $147/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $92/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $66/mo | -$26/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $27/mo | -$65/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the r5 family
R5 is AWS's memory-optimized Intel family, built for in-memory caches, real-time analytics, and memory-hungry databases that need more RAM per vCPU than general-purpose instances offer. It's common for staging replicas of production data stores that need enough headroom to load large datasets. Those replicas are usually only queried during active development hours, leaving an expensive, RAM-heavy box idling the rest of the time.
Regional pricing varies: r5.large runs $0.1260/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.2010/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, r5.xlarge (4 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $184/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than r5.large's ~$92/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle r5.large cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), an r5.large costs $0.1260/hr, or about $92/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 $65/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $26/mo (29%).
Why are memory-optimized staging replicas so expensive to leave on?
RAM is the priciest component you can idle: an r5 staging replica holds its dataset in memory whether anyone queries it or not, and billing charges the same for both. Because reloading data after boot takes minutes, teams leave them up "just in case" — a lease with a generous window covers the workday without paying for the empty nights.
Other r5 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.