How Much of Your AWS Runs While Nobody Is Working?

How much of your infrastructure runs while nobody is using it?

For most teams I’ve seen, it looks something like this:

• Working hours: ~8 hours
• Still running, nobody using it: ~16 hours

Dev environments, staging servers and test databases, running twice as long as they get used. And that’s just weekdays. Add weekends and the numbers get embarrassing.

Friction, not negligence

Nobody decides to pay for idle servers. It happens quietly.

Shutting things down by hand means remembering to do it, knowing which instances are safe to stop, and handling the morning when someone starts work before everything is back up. So people leave things running. The cost stays invisible enough that it never becomes urgent.

The actual numbers

If your dev environment runs 24/7 and you only use it 8 hours a day, you’re paying roughly 3x what you need to. Add weekends and it’s closer to 4x.

For a small environment that’s a few hundred dollars a month. For a bigger one, thousands. The machines are doing nothing for most of their lives.

Why I started building ParkMyAWS

That pattern is what pushed me to build ParkMyAWS.

It connects to your AWS account, you set your working hours, and it stops EC2 and RDS instances overnight and starts them again in the morning.

There’s no cost optimisation strategy involved and no consultant required. It stops the meter while nobody is logged in.