How much does an idle t3.medium cost on AWS?
A t3.medium billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $30/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $9/mo — a $21/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.0416/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$30/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$21/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.0416/hr | $0.0166/hr | ≈ $30/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.0416/hr | $0.0129/hr | ≈ $30/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.0416/hr | $0.0179/hr | ≈ $30/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.0448/hr | $0.0188/hr | ≈ $33/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.0456/hr | $0.0214/hr | ≈ $33/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.0480/hr | $0.0178/hr | ≈ $35/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.0528/hr | $0.0216/hr | ≈ $39/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.0528/hr | $0.0185/hr | ≈ $39/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.0544/hr | $0.0180/hr | ≈ $40/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.0672/hr | $0.0128/hr | ≈ $49/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $30/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $22/mo | -$9/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $9/mo | -$21/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the t3 family
T3 is AWS's third-generation burstable, general-purpose family: a baseline vCPU allocation topped up with CPU credits for short spikes. It fits small web servers, microservices, and low-to-moderate-traffic apps that mostly idle with the occasional burst. That exact shape — quiet most of the day, busy in short windows — is why so many dev and staging environments run on t3 and then sit fully idle overnight and on weekends.
Regional pricing varies: t3.medium runs $0.0416/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.0672/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 38% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, t3.large (2 vCPU / 8 GB RAM), costs about $61/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than t3.medium's ~$30/mo — for the same vCPU count but 2x the RAM.
Common questions
How much does an idle t3.medium cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a t3.medium costs $0.0416/hr, or about $30/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 $21/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $9/mo (29%).
Does stopping a t3 instance reset its CPU credits?
No — that was the old t2 behavior. On t3 the accrued credit balance survives a stop and persists for up to seven days, so a dev box parked overnight restarts with its credits intact; balances only expire after a week stopped. And since t3 launches in unlimited mode by default, even a longer pause just means a small surcharge on the first burst instead of throttling. The stopped hours themselves cost nothing but EBS storage.
Other t3 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.