How much does an idle e2-highmem-8 cost on Google Cloud?
An e2-highmem-8 billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $264/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-central1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $79/mo — a $185/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.3616/hr
us-central1
Running 24/7
$264/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$185/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-central1 Cheapest | $0.3616/hr | $0.2087/hr | ≈ $264/mo |
| us-east1 | $0.3616/hr | $0.2087/hr | ≈ $264/mo |
| us-west1 | $0.3616/hr | $0.2087/hr | ≈ $264/mo |
| europe-west1 | $0.3978/hr | $0.1835/hr | ≈ $290/mo |
| asia-southeast1 | $0.4461/hr | $0.2452/hr | ≈ $326/mo |
| asia-northeast1 | $0.4635/hr | $0.2678/hr | ≈ $338/mo |
| europe-west2 | $0.4659/hr | $0.1407/hr | ≈ $340/mo |
| europe-west3 | $0.4659/hr | $0.2155/hr | ≈ $340/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $264/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $189/mo | -$75/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $79/mo | -$185/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the e2 family
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. It's the default pick for dev sandboxes, small internal tools, and low-traffic staging services. Because it's already the "cheap" tier, teams rarely bother scheduling it off too — the box just runs continuously at a low background cost that adds up across a whole team's worth of sandboxes.
Regional pricing varies: e2-highmem-8 runs $0.3616/hr in us-central1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.4659/hr in europe-west2, the priciest — a 22% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
Common questions
How much does an idle e2-highmem-8 cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-central1), an e2-highmem-8 costs $0.3616/hr, or about $264/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 $185/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $75/mo (29%).
Why is e2 so much cheaper than n2?
E2 runs on capacity Google balances dynamically across hardware generations, trading guaranteed peak performance for price — usually a fine trade for dev sandboxes and small internal tools. The catch is psychological: "it is cheap" becomes the reason nobody schedules it off, and a fleet of always-on cheap boxes stops being cheap.
Other e2 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.