How much does an idle n1-standard-2 cost on Google Cloud?
An n1-standard-2 billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $69/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-central1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $21/mo — a $49/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.0950/hr
us-central1
Running 24/7
$69/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$49/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-central1 Cheapest | $0.0950/hr | $0.0319/hr | ≈ $69/mo |
| us-east1 | $0.0950/hr | $0.0319/hr | ≈ $69/mo |
| us-west1 | $0.0950/hr | $0.0319/hr | ≈ $69/mo |
| europe-west1 | $0.1045/hr | $0.0396/hr | ≈ $76/mo |
| asia-southeast1 | $0.1172/hr | $0.0247/hr | ≈ $86/mo |
| asia-northeast1 | $0.1219/hr | $0.0386/hr | ≈ $89/mo |
| europe-west2 | $0.1224/hr | $0.0290/hr | ≈ $89/mo |
| europe-west3 | $0.1224/hr | $0.0410/hr | ≈ $89/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $69/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $50/mo | -$20/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $21/mo | -$49/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the n1 family
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. A lot of long-running dev and test infrastructure was provisioned on N1 years ago and simply never migrated or rescheduled. That "it's been running fine, don't touch it" inertia is precisely how N1 boxes end up running 24/7 for workloads only used a few hours a week.
Regional pricing varies: n1-standard-2 runs $0.0950/hr in us-central1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.1224/hr in europe-west2, the priciest — a 22% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, n1-standard-4 (4 vCPU / 15 GB RAM), costs about $139/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than n1-standard-2's ~$69/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle n1-standard-2 cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-central1), an n1-standard-2 costs $0.0950/hr, or about $69/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 $49/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $20/mo (29%).
Should legacy n1 instances be migrated or just scheduled?
If it works and is only needed occasionally, scheduling is the cheaper first move — migration costs engineering time and risks breakage for a modest rate improvement. Years-old n1 dev infrastructure is also the most likely to be running 24/7 out of pure inertia, so it is often where a schedule recovers the most.
Other n1 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.