How much does an idle n2-standard-4 cost on Google Cloud?
An n2-standard-4 billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $142/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-central1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $42/mo — a $100/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.1942/hr
us-central1
Running 24/7
$142/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$100/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-central1 Cheapest | $0.1942/hr | $0.0838/hr | ≈ $142/mo |
| us-east1 | $0.1942/hr | $0.0838/hr | ≈ $142/mo |
| us-west1 | $0.1942/hr | $0.0838/hr | ≈ $142/mo |
| europe-west1 | $0.2137/hr | $0.0426/hr | ≈ $156/mo |
| asia-southeast1 | $0.2396/hr | $0.0848/hr | ≈ $175/mo |
| asia-northeast1 | $0.2492/hr | $0.0654/hr | ≈ $182/mo |
| europe-west2 | $0.2502/hr | $0.0460/hr | ≈ $183/mo |
| europe-west3 | $0.2502/hr | $0.0949/hr | ≈ $183/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $142/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $101/mo | -$41/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $42/mo | -$100/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the n2 family
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. It's a common choice for staging replicas of production services and mid-size application servers. These environments are typically only exercised during active development and testing windows, yet N2 instances are very often left running around the clock by default.
Regional pricing varies: n2-standard-4 runs $0.1942/hr in us-central1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.2502/hr in europe-west2, the priciest — a 22% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, n2-standard-8 (8 vCPU / 32 GB RAM), costs about $284/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than n2-standard-4's ~$142/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle n2-standard-4 cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-central1), an n2-standard-4 costs $0.1942/hr, or about $142/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 $100/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $41/mo (29%).
Do custom machine shapes change the idle math on n2?
Custom shapes let you trim a machine to exactly the vCPU and memory a workload needs, which lowers the hourly rate — but an exactly-right-sized machine idling overnight is still 100% waste. Right-sizing and scheduling are complementary levers: one lowers the rate, the other lowers the hours.
Other n2 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.