How much does an idle c2d-standard-4 cost on Google Cloud?
A c2d-standard-4 billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $133/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-central1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $39/mo — a $93/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.1816/hr
us-central1
Running 24/7
$133/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$93/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-central1 Cheapest | $0.1816/hr | $0.0554/hr | ≈ $133/mo |
| us-east1 | $0.1816/hr | $0.0554/hr | ≈ $133/mo |
| us-west1 | $0.1816/hr | $0.0554/hr | ≈ $133/mo |
| europe-west1 | $0.1999/hr | $0.0244/hr | ≈ $146/mo |
| asia-southeast1 | $0.2240/hr | $0.0844/hr | ≈ $164/mo |
| asia-northeast1 | $0.2332/hr | $0.0795/hr | ≈ $170/mo |
| europe-west2 | $0.2340/hr | $0.0749/hr | ≈ $171/mo |
| europe-west3 | $0.2340/hr | $0.0619/hr | ≈ $171/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $133/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $95/mo | -$38/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $39/mo | -$93/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the c2d family
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. Non-production performance-test rigs and simulation sandboxes on C2D see the same bursty pattern as C2 — real load during a benchmark or test run, nothing in between — making scheduled shutdown a large, easy win.
Regional pricing varies: c2d-standard-4 runs $0.1816/hr in us-central1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.2340/hr in europe-west2, the priciest — a 22% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, c2d-standard-8 (8 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $265/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than c2d-standard-4's ~$133/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle c2d-standard-4 cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-central1), a c2d-standard-4 costs $0.1816/hr, or about $133/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 $93/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $38/mo (29%).
How do teams schedule performance-test rigs on c2d?
The pattern that works is tying the rig's lifecycle to the test run itself — started by the pipeline, stopped when the run completes — rather than keeping a standing environment. A benchmark box that exists only during benchmarks gives identical results at a fraction of the instance-hours.
Other c2d sizes
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 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.