# Scheduling Amazon WorkSpaces

> WorkSpaces schedules stop and start desktops through the WorkSpaces API, but only AutoStop (hourly) billing responds: an AlwaysOn WorkSpace bills its flat monthly rate stopped or not. Hourly mode also carries a base fee near $10 a month that no schedule removes, and a stopped desktop resumes with apps and session intact.

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

---

## Two billing modes, one of them schedulable

Every WorkSpace runs in one of two modes. AlwaysOn bills a flat monthly rate regardless of use,
and stopping it changes nothing on the invoice, making a schedule cosmetic. AutoStop bills by the
hour of running time, and there the schedule does exactly what it promises. The first task
before scheduling a WorkSpaces fleet is therefore an audit of billing modes, and the biggest
saving available is often converting under-used AlwaysOn desktops to AutoStop rather than the
schedule itself.

## The base fee stays either way

AutoStop pricing is a fixed monthly infrastructure fee plus the hourly rate: for a Standard
bundle, roughly $9.75 a month plus about 30 cents per running hour. The schedule eliminates
hours, never the base fee. A desktop stopped 24/7 for a month still bills its monthly
component, which is the number to use when deciding whether a rarely-used WorkSpace should
instead be rebuilt on demand.

## Sessions survive the stop

A stopped WorkSpace preserves its state: open applications and the desktop session come back on
resume, closer to a laptop lid-close than a reboot. Resume takes on the order of a minute or
two, so a start cron 15 minutes before shift start makes the wait invisible. User and root
volumes persist regardless, and their storage is inside the bundle price rather than a separate
line.

## Where schedules beat the native idle timer

AutoStop already suspends a desktop after its idle timeout, but idle detection is defeated by
anything that looks like activity, and the minimum granularity is coarse. A calendar stop at
19:00 is deterministic: the fleet is off at night and weekends no matter what a stray process
is doing on screen.

## Fleet-shaped arithmetic

Per-desktop numbers are small; fleets are not. A 200-seat AutoStop fleet that runs 50 hours a
week instead of 168 avoids well over 20,000 desktop-hours a month. Schedules on WorkSpaces are
a volume play.