On-Demand, Reserved, Spot

On-Demand is the list price, billed per second (60-second minimum) with no commitment: $0.0168 an hour for a t4g.small (2 vCPUs, 2 GiB, Graviton2), or $12.26 for the 730 hours AWS 24 counts as a month. Reserved Instances commit you to one instance type in one Region for one or three years; a one-year Standard RI with no upfront payment costs $0.0105 an hour, 37% off. AWS now recommends Savings Plans in their place as RIs expire. Spot sells spare capacity at up to 90% off but can be reclaimed after a two-minute warning, which suits CI runners and queue workers, never the server holding your MySQL 524 data. Run a new server On-Demand for a month, read the bill, then commit.