How much does an idle t3a.nano cost on AWS?
A t3a.nano billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $2/mo at its cheapest listed region (ap-south-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $1/mo — a $2/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.0031/hr
ap-south-1
Running 24/7
$2/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$2/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ap-south-1 Cheapest | $0.0031/hr | $0.0011/hr | ≈ $2/mo |
| us-east-1 | $0.0047/hr | $0.0021/hr | ≈ $3/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.0047/hr | $0.0016/hr | ≈ $3/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.0047/hr | $0.0024/hr | ≈ $3/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.0051/hr | $0.0024/hr | ≈ $4/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.0054/hr | $0.0017/hr | ≈ $4/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.0059/hr | $0.0024/hr | ≈ $4/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.0059/hr | $0.0028/hr | ≈ $4/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.0061/hr | $0.0019/hr | ≈ $4/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.0076/hr | $0.0016/hr | ≈ $6/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $2/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $2/mo | -$1/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $1/mo | -$2/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the t3a family
T3a is the AMD EPYC counterpart to T3: the same burstable-credit model, priced roughly 10% below the Intel equivalent for near-identical performance. Teams pick it for dev servers, test environments, and small internal tools where the workload is bursty and cost sensitivity trumps a marginal single-thread edge. Because these are almost always non-critical environments, they're also the ones most likely to be left running through a weekend nobody is using them.
Regional pricing varies: t3a.nano runs $0.0031/hr in ap-south-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.0076/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 59% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, t3a.micro (2 vCPU / 1 GB RAM), costs about $5/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than t3a.nano's ~$2/mo — for the same vCPU count but 2x the RAM.
Common questions
How much does an idle t3a.nano cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (ap-south-1), a t3a.nano costs $0.0031/hr, or about $2/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 $2/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $1/mo (29%).
Is t3a really cheaper than t3 for the same work?
List price runs roughly 10% below the Intel-based t3 at the same sizes, with the same burstable credit model, and for typical dev and staging workloads the performance difference is negligible. The bigger lever is still hours, though: a t3a that runs only when leased beats a t3 running 24/7 by far more than 10%.
Other t3a 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.