Your dev and staging environments run 168 hours a week. Your team uses 45.
That's 73% of the bill — every night, every weekend — spent on nothing.
Scheduled start/stop for EC2, RDS, ECS, and NAT Gateway. Runs inside your own AWS account. Deploys in minutes with CloudFormation.
upscan is our free scanner — no signup, no credit card. It scans your AWS account (credentials never shared) and tells you your number.
✔ Scanning EC2 · RDS · ECS · NAT Gateway across us-east-1✔ 42 resources analyzed over 30 days RESOURCE IDLE RECLAIMABLE EC2 · 14 idle 73% $612 / mo RDS · 6 idle 68% $840 / mo ECS · 9 idle 71% $233 / mo NAT · 3 idle — $155 / mo➜ Reclaimable: $1,840 / month — 73% of this account's non-prod spend$ ▋Why not Instance Scheduler on AWS?
AWS ships a free, well-maintained scheduler, and for a lot of estates it's the right call. Here is exactly where the two differ, so you can decide before you install anything.
| Capability | Instance Scheduler on AWS | Uptime Scheduler |
|---|---|---|
| Resource types | EC2 and RDS | EC2, RDS, ECS, and NAT Gateway |
| NAT Gateway scheduling | Not supported | Deletes on the off-window, recreates with the same Elastic IP |
| RDS 7-day forced restart | Instance silently runs again until someone notices | Your schedule re-applies and stops it at the next off-window |
| Savings reporting | Build your own from Cost Explorer | Dashboard with actual Cost Explorer dollars, per account and resource |
| Runs in your own AWS account | Yes | Yes — CloudFormation, no standing cross-account access |
| Cost and operation | Free — you deploy, tune, and operate it | Paid and managed, with support |
Where we go further
A NAT Gateway has no stop button. It bills at $0.045 per hour — about $32 a month — every hour of the year, plus data processing, whether or not anything behind it is awake. We schedule it the only way AWS allows: delete it on the off-window and recreate it with the same Elastic IP when work resumes. Instance Scheduler doesn't touch NAT Gateways at all and the same applies to ECS services.
Because a stopped RDS instance is force-started by AWS after 7 days, a plain stop is not durable — our schedule re-applies and stops it again at the next off-window, so a paused database doesn't quietly go back on the clock.
When AWS's scheduler is the better choice
If your environment is EC2-only, Instance Scheduler covers it well and costs nothing beyond the DynamoDB and Lambda it runs on.
If your team has a firm policy against any third-party in the account, or you already have the engineering time to deploy and maintain a scheduler yourself - go for it.
Our tools help manage the scheduling of the painful services that AWS doesn't cover, and provide a clear dashboard to see the savings accumulate across multiple accounts.
Set up in five minutes, save from day one
Uptime Scheduler runs entirely inside your AWS account. There is no agent to install, no code to change, and no data leaves your infrastructure.
Connect your AWS account
Deploy a CloudFormation stack into your AWS account — it takes under two minutes. The stack creates the Lambda functions and IAM role that power the scheduler. You review every permission before deploying. We never have direct access to your infrastructure, and all actions are logged in your own CloudTrail.
Tag the resources you want to schedule
Add an uptime:schedule tag to any EC2 instance, RDS database, ECS service, or NAT Gateway. Set the value to your working hours — for example 9-17 mon-fri. Schedules are timezone-aware, so your team's local hours are always respected regardless of where your AWS region is located.
Watch the savings accumulate
From the first night your resources stop on schedule, you are saving money. The dashboard shows exactly how much you have saved, broken down by account and resource type — real numbers from AWS Cost Explorer, not estimates. Most teams recover the cost of their subscription within the first week.
Built for engineering and FinOps teams
Uptime Scheduler is designed for DevOps engineers, platform teams, and FinOps practitioners who manage non-production AWS environments — development, staging, QA, and load-testing accounts. If your EC2 instances, RDS databases, ECS services, or NAT Gateways sit idle every night and weekend, you are spending money you do not need to spend. A typical team running a dev and staging environment saves between $200 and $2,000 per month by scheduling those resources to stop outside business hours. Uptime Scheduler makes that happen automatically, without any changes to your application code or deployment pipelines.
Automated AWS cost savings,
without the overhead
One tag on a resource is all it takes. Uptime Scheduler handles the rest — scheduling, execution, and reporting — entirely within your AWS account.
Tag-based setup
Add uptime:schedule to any resource and it's scheduled. No code, no config files, no IAM changes.
Timezone-aware schedules
Write schedules in plain English — 9-17 mon-fri. They fire in your team's timezone, every time.
EC2, RDS, NAT & ECS
Schedule all the resource types that make up your dev and staging environments. One scheduler, one tag format, across your whole stack.
Runs inside your account
The scheduling stack deploys via CloudFormation into your own AWS account. Your infrastructure data never leaves. We never have direct access to your resources.
Multi-account management
Connect multiple AWS accounts — dev, staging, production — and manage all your scheduled resources from a single dashboard.
Cost savings dashboard
See exactly how much you've saved, broken down by account and resource type. Real numbers, not estimates.
Simple, Transparent Pricing
Start saving on your first day. No hidden fees, cancel anytime.
Perfect for individual developers managing their own AWS environments.
For engineering teams and technical managers who need org-wide scheduling.
For large organisations with complex requirements and dedicated support needs.