[antaviana]

I do not have exact costs at hand because it is just one of several AWS instances we have, but probably my fully loaded costs on a 160 hour month for this instance would be something like:

- 150GB SSD: $15 - 150GB 30 last days of daily snapshshots as a backup: $3.45 - 160 hours of t2.medium (4GB) Windows: $8.64

The typical applications I use are Visual Studio, Delphi, Office, Chrome, and some domain specific apps.

Admittedly, you can reduce further the SSD cost of $15 to 160/744*$15=$3.22, by snapshotting and deleting the SSD volume each time you shut down but I never did that optimization because startup time would then not be seconds but something probably in the range of 5 minutes, as you need to have some lambda funciton create a new instance, create a volume from the last snapshot, shutdown the newly created instance, replace the boot volume and finally start the instance with the right boot volume.

What I also like of this approach is that I do not have to overprovision disk or instances, if I ever need a larger drive, I just modify the volume, if I need a bigger instance, I just shutdown and start with a bigger instance size.