--- title: 'ParkMyAWS vs AWS Instance Scheduler' description: 'AWS Instance Scheduler is free, but free has a price. A detailed comparison of features, setup time, and total cost of ownership versus a managed alternative.' date: '2026-05-21' readingTime: '7 min read' --- ## The Honest Comparison If you search for how to schedule EC2 and RDS instances, AWS Instance Scheduler is the first thing you will find. It is free, AWS supports it, and the docs are thorough. So why would anyone pay for something else? Free and cheap are not the same thing, and AWS Instance Scheduler is the clearest example I know of the difference. What follows is an honest read on both, and that includes the parts where AWS Instance Scheduler is simply the better pick. Whichever way you go, you should know what you are actually signing up for. ## What Each Tool Actually Is **AWS Instance Scheduler** is a reference solution that AWS ships as a CloudFormation template. Deploy it and you get a Lambda function, a DynamoDB table holding your schedule definitions, EventBridge rules, and a CloudWatch dashboard. You tag each EC2 and RDS instance with a schedule name, and the Lambda stops and starts them accordingly. **ParkMyAWS** is managed SaaS. It connects to your AWS account through an IAM role, you pick resources and set schedules in a web UI, and the schedules run from our infrastructure. The only thing that ever lands in your account is the IAM role. The end result is the same. The way you live with each is not. ## Feature Comparison | Feature | ParkMyAWS | AWS Instance Scheduler | | ----------------------------- | ------------------------ | ----------------------------------- | | Setup time | 5 minutes | 2-4 hours per account | | Cost | Monthly subscription | Free (Lambda + DynamoDB ~$2-10/mo) | | EC2 support | Yes | Yes | | RDS support | Yes | Yes | | Aurora support | Yes | Limited | | Multi-account | Built-in, single sign-on | Deploy per account | | Multi-region | Built-in | Deploy per region | | Schedule editing | Web UI | DynamoDB items | | Savings dashboard | Yes | No | | Failure notifications | Email, Slack | CloudWatch alarm (DIY) | | 7-day RDS auto-start handling | Automatic | Automatic | | Audit log | Web UI | CloudWatch logs | | Updates and maintenance | Handled by us | You update the CloudFormation stack | ## Where AWS Instance Scheduler Wins There are real cases where the free option is the right answer, and I would tell you to take it. **You have one AWS account in one region.** The deploy-per-account headache never touches you. CloudFormation is a one-time cost and then you are done. **You have a DevOps engineer who lives in CloudFormation and DynamoDB.** Editing schedules as DynamoDB items is clunky work, but if that is already your day job, it barely registers. **Your security policy forbids granting IAM roles to third-party services.** That is a legitimate reason to stay self-hosted, and I am not going to pretend it away. **You set a few static schedules once and rarely touch them.** When you never go back to edit anything, the friction of DynamoDB stops mattering. **A clean line item beats a low total cost.** Some teams find a $0 line item far easier to defend than a $50 SaaS subscription, even when the hidden engineering time costs ten times the subscription. ## Where ParkMyAWS Wins Then there are the cases where paying for the managed version earns its keep several times over. **Multiple AWS accounts.** AWS Instance Scheduler is per-account by design. Five accounts means five deployments, five upgrade cycles, and five places to check when something looks off. ParkMyAWS connects every account through one IAM role each and puts them all on a single dashboard. **Schedules that move.** Shifting business hours from 8 AM to 9 AM means hand-editing a DynamoDB item, and doing it across regions multiplies the tedium. The same change in a web UI is a ten-second job. **You actually want a savings estimate.** Instance Scheduler tracks nothing on this front. You could wire up a dashboard from Cost Explorer data, but be honest, you never will. ParkMyAWS shows your estimated avoided cost this month, last month, and over time. **Non-engineers need to manage schedules.** Finance, ops, and PMs will happily edit a web UI. None of them are going anywhere near DynamoDB. **You want to hear about failures.** Instance Scheduler writes failures to CloudWatch and stops there. Alarms on top of that are yet more CloudFormation. We just send you an email or a Slack message when something breaks. **This is not your product.** Every hour your team spends nursing a scheduling tool is an hour stolen from the thing you actually sell. ## Total Cost of Ownership This is the part where the "free" label starts to look uncomfortable. **AWS Instance Scheduler real costs:** - Lambda invocations and DynamoDB reads: roughly $2-10 per month per account, by AWS's own estimate (it varies by Region, about $2/month in Frankfurt, closer to $10/month in us-east-1) - Engineering time for initial deployment: 4-8 hours - Engineering time for ongoing maintenance: 1-2 hours per month - Engineering time when something breaks: 4-8 hours per incident - CloudFormation drift fixes when AWS updates the solution: 2-4 hours per year Add up only the work you can predict (deployment, routine maintenance, and drift fixes) and leave incident response out of it entirely. That still lands at roughly 18 to 36 engineering hours in the first year. At a fully-loaded cost of $150/hour, the "free" solution runs about **$2,700 to $5,400** for one account before anything goes wrong. Treat those as illustrative rather than a quote, but the direction is what counts. The line item says $0 while the real first-year cost climbs into the thousands, and every extra account you deploy to multiplies it again. **ParkMyAWS real costs:** - Subscription cost - Initial setup time: 5-10 minutes per account - Ongoing maintenance: zero Take a small-to-medium deployment, say ten non-production EC2 instances and three non-production RDS databases. A team that size typically saves **$1,000 to $3,000 per month**. The subscription is a sliver of that, and the engineering hours you would have spent babysitting Lambda go back into the product instead. ## The "We Already Built Our Own" Trap You have probably seen this one. A team wired up scheduling with Lambda and EventBridge a year back, it mostly works, and nobody wants to be the one who throws it out. Three questions are worth sitting with: 1. **Who is on-call for it?** If the answer is "the person who built it, and they hand in their notice next month," you already have a problem. 2. **When did it last fail silently?** If you cannot say, assume it has. 3. **What would it take to match a managed service?** Dashboards, notifications, multi-account support, a web UI for non-engineers, audit logs. Tally the hours that list represents. The sunk cost is real, I get it. But the maintenance bill keeps compounding while the sunk cost just sits there, and most teams who rolled their own end up replacing it inside two years anyway. ## Making the Call One account, a DevOps engineer with room to spare, no need for a savings dashboard or non-engineer access? **Use AWS Instance Scheduler.** For that situation it is a genuinely good solution and I would not talk you out of it. But if you are running multiple accounts, want a dashboard, want non-engineers editing schedules, or just refuse to pour engineering time into infrastructure that is not your product, then **a managed [AWS Instance Scheduler alternative](https://parkmyaws.com/aws-instance-scheduler-alternative) like ParkMyAWS comes out ahead on both money and time even after you account for the subscription**. Either way you end up in the same place: your non-production instances go quiet when nobody is using them. What decides it is what your team's hours are worth, and whether you would rather keep paying AWS for idle instances or pay a SaaS to make sure you stop.