Interruptible capacity at a deep discount — model the monthly saving.
Spot saves 60–90% but the instance can vanish in two minutes — perfect for batch and CI, wrong for databases. For steady always-on load compare the reserved instance savings calculator.
Free spot instance savings calculator — on-demand rate, spot discount and hours to your monthly and yearly savings.
Commonly 60–90% off on-demand, depending on instance type and current spare capacity. The trade-off is that the provider can reclaim the instance with about two minutes notice, so the savings only apply to workloads that tolerate interruption.
Fault-tolerant, stateless or checkpointable jobs: CI/CD runners, batch processing, data pipelines, video rendering, ML training with checkpoints, and stateless web workers behind a queue. Avoid spot for databases, stateful singletons or anything that cannot resume mid-task.