A dev environment used 12 hours on weekdays sits idle 64% of the week. Scheduling it off saves most of its compute bill, but some charges keep running and RDS restarts itself after seven days. What to schedule, with which AWS tool, what still costs money when everything is stopped, and the settings that keep it from annoying the people who work late.
Running only from 8:00 to 20:00 on weekdays is 60 hours out of 168. For anything billed by the hour, that is 64% off: a $300 a month dev database becomes about $107, and a $120 instance about $43. The savings are real, but so are the details that make teams turn the schedule off a month later.
EBS volumes and snapshots, by the GB, whether the instance runs or not.
RDS and Aurora storage and backups.
NAT gateways: about $33 a month each before any traffic. A dev VPC with one per Availability Zone can cost more than the instances behind it.
Public IPv4 addresses, including Elastic IPs, at $0.005 an hour.
Load balancers, by the hour.
EKS control planes, at $0.10 an hour per cluster.
Schedule by tag (for example Schedule=office-hours), so new resources opt in by being tagged, not by editing a list.
Give people an easy way to keep something on: an opt-out tag, or a chat command that starts the environment for a few hours.
Set the time zone in the schedule itself; EventBridge Scheduler accepts one per schedule.
Stop databases after the instances that use them, and start them first.
Report the savings monthly from Cost Explorer, by the same tag, so the schedule keeps its supporters.
We'll go through what runs overnight across your accounts and set up the schedules with you. 30 minutes, free.
Once a month: what changed in tech that month and what it means for you, from cloud and AI to security and the tools you build with. Every item links to its source. No sales pitch, unsubscribe in one click.
Book a free 30-minute call about it. Bring your setup and your bill; you'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Or keep reading
Still on m4, c4, t2 or m5? Moving Old EC2 Generations to Graviton and Current Intel
Old instance families cost the same or more than current ones and deliver less. A current Graviton instance is usually 15–20% cheaper at list price than the Intel generation many fleets still run, before any performance gain. What moves easily, what does not, and how to do it without a big-bang migration.
Read
AWS Spend Limits: How the Hard Monthly Cap Works, What Pauses, and Who Can Use It
AWS now has a hard spending cap. A project in the new AWS experience pauses when it reaches its monthly limit instead of billing past it: every resource stops, S3 included, and data is kept for 90 days. It covers all of the project's charges, egress too, but only for projects created through the new signup experience. Not existing accounts, and not Organizations, yet.
Read
As of November 9, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.