Google Cloud instance idle costs
Every Google Cloud instance type costs money whether it's serving traffic or sitting idle overnight — cloud billing doesn't know the difference. Below is what each of the 34 Google Cloud instance types across 7 families costs at its cheapest listed region, running 24/7. Pick a type to see the full region breakdown and what a schedule saves.
c2
C2 is GCP's compute-optimized Intel Cascade Lake family, built for the highest sustained per-core performance — HPC, high-performance gaming servers, ad serving, and media transcoding.
c2d
C2D is the AMD EPYC (Milan) compute-optimized counterpart to C2, aimed at the same class of CPU-bound HPC, simulation, and transcoding workloads at a different price/performance point.
e2
E2 is GCP's cost-optimized, general-purpose family, dynamically balanced across host hardware to keep price low for workloads that don't need guaranteed peak performance.
n1
N1 is GCP's original general-purpose family — still widely used for legacy services, custom machine types, and workloads that attach GPUs where newer families have narrower support.
n2
N2 is GCP's balanced general-purpose family on Intel Cascade Lake/Ice Lake, supporting custom machine shapes for workloads that need a precise vCPU-to-memory ratio.
n2d
N2D swaps Intel for AMD EPYC at the same general-purpose, custom-shape flexibility as N2, usually at a lower price for comparable throughput.
t2d
T2D is GCP's AMD EPYC (Milan) cost-optimized family, tuned for scale-out, horizontally distributed workloads — containerized microservices, web front ends, and batch fleets that scale by adding instances rather than making one instance bigger.
Stop paying for idle Google Cloud 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 standard instances at each type's cheapest listed region 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.