How much does an idle r6i.large cost on AWS?
An r6i.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 | $0.0466/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.1260/hr | $0.0428/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.1260/hr | $0.0517/hr | ≈ $92/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.1300/hr | $0.0429/hr | ≈ $95/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.1410/hr | $0.0677/hr | ≈ $103/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.1510/hr | $0.0589/hr | ≈ $110/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.1520/hr | $0.0547/hr | ≈ $111/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.1520/hr | $0.0608/hr | ≈ $111/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.1520/hr | $0.0486/hr | ≈ $111/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.2010/hr | $0.0402/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 r6i family
R6i is the sixth-generation Intel Ice Lake refresh of the memory-optimized line, offering better memory bandwidth and per-core performance than R5 for the same class of workload — in-memory stores, analytics engines, and large-dataset test environments. Migrating a staging cache or analytics sandbox to R6i is a common "keep pace with prod" move, but it inherits the same idle-outside-work-hours pattern as R5 unless someone adds a schedule.
Regional pricing varies: r6i.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, r6i.xlarge (4 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $184/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than r6i.large's ~$92/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle r6i.large cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), an r6i.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%).
Does r6i change the idle math versus r5?
Slightly better memory bandwidth and per-core performance at a similar price make it a good default for new environments, but it is rarely worth a migration on its own. The idle math is unchanged: a memory-optimized box that nobody queries overnight is the same waste on either generation.
Other r6i 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.