How much does an idle t4g.xlarge cost on AWS?
A t4g.xlarge billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $65/mo at its cheapest listed region (ap-south-1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $19/mo — a $46/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.0896/hr
ap-south-1
Running 24/7
$65/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$46/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ap-south-1 Cheapest | $0.0896/hr | $0.0448/hr | ≈ $65/mo |
| us-east-1 | $0.1344/hr | $0.0632/hr | ≈ $98/mo |
| us-east-2 | $0.1344/hr | $0.0632/hr | ≈ $98/mo |
| us-west-2 | $0.1344/hr | $0.0645/hr | ≈ $98/mo |
| eu-west-1 | $0.1472/hr | $0.0721/hr | ≈ $107/mo |
| eu-central-1 | $0.1536/hr | $0.0660/hr | ≈ $112/mo |
| ap-southeast-1 | $0.1696/hr | $0.0950/hr | ≈ $124/mo |
| ap-southeast-2 | $0.1696/hr | $0.0746/hr | ≈ $124/mo |
| ap-northeast-1 | $0.1728/hr | $0.0760/hr | ≈ $126/mo |
| sa-east-1 | $0.2144/hr | $0.0772/hr | ≈ $157/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $65/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $47/mo | -$19/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $19/mo | -$46/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the t4g family
T4g runs on AWS Graviton2 (Arm64) and offers the best price-performance in the burstable family for software that supports Arm — Node, Go, most modern Java and Python stacks. It's a natural fit for dev/test replicas, CI build agents, and small services where the team has already validated Arm compatibility. Like its x86 siblings, it's cheap enough that nobody bothers scheduling it off, so idle time quietly compounds.
Regional pricing varies: t4g.xlarge runs $0.0896/hr in ap-south-1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.2144/hr in sa-east-1, the priciest — a 58% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, t4g.2xlarge (8 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $131/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than t4g.xlarge's ~$65/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle t4g.xlarge cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (ap-south-1), a t4g.xlarge costs $0.0896/hr, or about $65/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 $46/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $19/mo (29%).
Will my software run on t4g (Arm/Graviton)?
Most modern stacks do — Node, Go, Python, and current JVMs all ship Arm64 builds, and popular Docker images publish multi-arch manifests. The usual blockers are older native dependencies and closed-source agents. Teams typically validate once on a single t4g dev box before moving a wider fleet across.
Other t4g 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.