How much does an idle n2d-standard-8 cost on Google Cloud?
An n2d-standard-8 billed on-demand and left running around the clock costs about $247/mo at its cheapest listed region (us-central1). Scheduling it off outside business hours cuts that to roughly $73/mo — a $173/mo saving.
Cheapest on-demand
$0.3380/hr
us-central1
Running 24/7
$247/mo
730-hour month
Business-hours savings
$173/mo
70% off the 24/7 bill
Price by region
| Region | Hourly (on-demand) | Spot (typical) | ≈ Monthly (24/7) |
|---|---|---|---|
| us-central1 Cheapest | $0.3380/hr | $0.0890/hr | ≈ $247/mo |
| us-east1 | $0.3380/hr | $0.0890/hr | ≈ $247/mo |
| us-west1 | $0.3380/hr | $0.0890/hr | ≈ $247/mo |
| europe-west1 | $0.3718/hr | $0.1467/hr | ≈ $271/mo |
| asia-southeast1 | $0.4169/hr | $0.0779/hr | ≈ $304/mo |
| asia-northeast1 | $0.4336/hr | $0.1661/hr | ≈ $317/mo |
| europe-west2 | $0.4354/hr | $0.1659/hr | ≈ $318/mo |
| europe-west3 | $0.4354/hr | $0.2507/hr | ≈ $318/mo |
What a schedule saves
| Schedule | Monthly cost | Savings vs 24/7 |
|---|---|---|
| Running 24/7 | $247/mo | baseline |
| Weekdays only (off on weekends) | $176/mo | -$70/mo (29%) |
| Business hours only (10×5) | $73/mo | -$173/mo (70%) |
Assumes a 730-hour month at on-demand list price. Actual savings depend on when the instance is actually used.
About the n2d family
N2D swaps Intel for AMD EPYC at the same general-purpose, custom-shape flexibility as N2, usually at a lower price for comparable throughput. Teams pick it for the same staging and internal-tooling workloads as N2 when optimizing for cost. The discount only pays off if the box is actually off when nobody needs it — an idling N2D overnight is still paying for 16 unused hours a day.
Regional pricing varies: n2d-standard-8 runs $0.3380/hr in us-central1, the cheapest region priced here, versus $0.4354/hr in europe-west2, the priciest — a 22% spread across regions for the identical instance type.
The next size up in the same family, n2d-standard-16 (16 vCPU / 64 GB RAM), costs about $493/mo running 24/7 at its cheapest region — roughly 100% more than n2d-standard-8's ~$247/mo — for 2x the vCPU.
Common questions
How much does an idle n2d-standard-8 cost per month?
At the cheapest listed region (us-central1), an n2d-standard-8 costs $0.3380/hr, or about $247/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 $173/mo (70%) versus running 24/7. A lighter schedule — on around the clock on weekdays, off on weekends — still saves about $70/mo (29%).
Is n2d's AMD discount worth switching for?
For staging and internal tooling, usually yes — comparable throughput at a lower list price, with the same shape flexibility as n2. Like every discount, it only lands if the hours are under control: a discount on an instance that runs 24/7 unused is a smaller waste, not a saving.
Other n2d 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.