How much does an idle t3.micro cost on AWS?
A t3.micro billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $8/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-east-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $2/mo — a $5/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.0104/hr
us-east-1
Running 24/7
$8/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$5/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-east-1 Cheapest | $0.0104/hr | $0.0043/hr | ≈ $8/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.0104/hr | $0.0030/hr | ≈ $8/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.0104/hr | $0.0037/hr | ≈ $8/mo |
| ap-south-1 | $0.0112/hr | $0.0036/hr | ≈ $8/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.0114/hr | $0.0055/hr | ≈ $8/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.0120/hr | $0.0044/hr | ≈ $9/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.0132/hr | $0.0053/hr | ≈ $10/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.0132/hr | $0.0055/hr | ≈ $10/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.0136/hr | $0.0046/hr | ≈ $10/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.0168/hr | $0.0030/hr | ≈ $12/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $8/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $5/mo | -$2/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $2/mo | -$5/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.micro runs $0.0104/hr in us-east-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.0168/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.small (2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM), costs about $15/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than t3.micro's ~$8/mo — for the same vCPU count but 2x the RAM.
Common questions
How much does an idle t3.micro cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-east-1), a t3.micro costs $0.0104/hr, or about $8/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 $5/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $2/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.