How much does an idle r7i.xlarge cost on AWS?
An r7i.xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $193/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $57/mo — a $136/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.2646/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$193/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$136/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.2646/hr | $0.1032/hr | ≈ $193/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.2646/hr | $0.0688/hr | ≈ $193/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.2646/hr | $0.1111/hr | ≈ $193/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.2730/hr | $0.1065/hr | ≈ $199/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.2961/hr | $0.1510/hr | ≈ $216/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.3171/hr | $0.1173/hr | ≈ $231/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.3192/hr | $0.1277/hr | ≈ $233/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.3192/hr | $0.1085/hr | ≈ $233/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.3192/hr | $0.1149/hr | ≈ $233/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.4221/hr | $0.0507/hr | ≈ $308/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $193/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $138/mo | -$55/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $57/mo | -$136/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the r7i family
R7i is the newest Intel Sapphire Rapids memory-optimized instance, pairing DDR5 memory with the highest per-vCPU RAM ratio in the current R-line for large in-memory workloads and memory-bound test environments. Being the newest tier, it's frequently chosen for fresh staging environments spun up without a shutdown schedule inherited from an older, already-scheduled box — so it's an easy place for idle spend to hide.
Regional pricing varies: r7i.xlarge runs $0.2646/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.4221/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, r7i.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 64 GB RAM), costs about $386/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than r7i.xlarge's ~$193/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle r7i.xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), an r7i.xlarge costs $0.2646/hr, or about $193/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 $136/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $55/mo (29%).
What is the idle risk on a brand-new family like r7i?
New environments get provisioned far more often than old ones get cleaned up, and an r7i staging box created for one project tends to outlive it. Newest-generation instances also carry the least institutional "turn it off" habit, since no schedule was ever inherited. Baking a lease in from day one is cheaper than retrofitting one later.
Other r7i 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.