# Scheduling Amazon Lightsail Instance

> Lightsail bundles bill their flat monthly price whether the instance runs 720 hours or 0. A stopped $10 instance still costs $10. A schedule therefore buys operational hygiene rather than savings: a smaller overnight attack surface and predictable dev-box hours. Deleting, not stopping, is what ends the charge.

Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/aws/lightsail/schedule
Updated: 2026-08-19

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## Bundle pricing ignores the power state

Lightsail sells fixed monthly bundles, and the bundle bills as long as the instance exists. Stop
it every night for a month and the invoice is identical to the always-on month. This is the
opposite of EC2's per-second model and it changes what a schedule is for. Anyone adopting a
Lightsail schedule expecting the 60-70% off-hours saving that instance-hour billing delivers
will see 0% and should hear that up front.

## What the schedule is genuinely good for

An off-at-night instance cannot be probed, brute-forced or crypto-mined while nobody is
watching, and a dev box that turns itself off enforces working hours better than a wiki page
does. For internet-facing hobby and staging machines, shrinking the exposed window from 168 to
50 hours a week is a real security win, but simply not a billing one.

## The address changes every morning

A stopped Lightsail instance releases its dynamic public IP and starts with a new one. DNS
records, firewall allowlists and anything else keyed to the address break on the first scheduled
start unless the instance holds a static IP, which stays put across stop and start while
attached.

Attached block storage disks and their snapshots carry their own small monthly charges, and those
continue regardless of the instance power state, consistent with everything else about the bundle
model.

## If the goal really is savings

Two honest paths exist. Move the workload to EC2, where stopping actually pauses the compute
charge and the schedule does what people expect. Or, for machines needed only occasionally,
take a snapshot and delete the instance. Snapshot storage costs cents per GB-month, and a new
instance can be created from it in minutes when needed. A schedule can still automate the
window in the first case; the second is a lifecycle decision, not a cron.

## The one line to remember

For Lightsail, existence is the billable event. Schedules control exposure and habits; deletion
controls cost.