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ParkMyAWS auto-stops non-production EC2 and RDS nights and weekends, saving 30-65% on idle costs.
Grounded in available product and source data
Idle non-production servers rarely announce themselves, which is exactly why ParkMyAWS exists: to auto-schedule EC2 and RDS to cut idle costs, since the site states most teams save 30-65% on non-production spend once resources stop running 24/7 for no reason.
Setup deliberately avoids the usual cloud-automation overhead: connecting an account uses a cross-account IAM role via AWS STS AssumeRole rather than static keys, taking about 2 minutes, after which ParkMyAWS discovers EC2 and RDS resources across every enabled region with no agents to install. From there, a schedule gets picked from a template — Business Hours, Extended Hours, Weekends — or defined as a custom cron expression, with the user choosing exactly which resources actually get touched.
That last point matters more than it might seem: the FAQ addresses the obvious fear directly — nothing gets scheduled automatically, and a production environment keeps running unless someone deliberately assigns it a parking schedule. Security follows the same deliberate-scope logic, with least-privilege IAM permissions limited to read-only discovery plus scoped start/stop actions, no access to application data or database contents, and every API call logged in CloudTrail.
The site draws a direct comparison against the free alternative most teams consider first — writing a Lambda + EventBridge solution, or deploying AWS's own Instance Scheduler — noting both leave a team hosting, maintaining, and debugging the automation themselves, including quarterly patching for AWS's own tool. ParkMyAWS instead positions itself as a 5-minute, no-code managed setup. Three tiers scale by AWS account count, resource count, and team size — Starter for solo devs, Pro for growing teams with multiple environments, and Team for larger, more complex infrastructure — with every tier including all supported services and a 14-day free trial requiring no credit card. The page reviewed also does not specify exact per-second or per-minute billing granularity for the underlying AWS stop/start actions, and ECS scale-to-zero support is still listed as coming soon rather than available today — worth checking directly against current AWS billing docs for the full cost picture.
Not automatically — discovery and scheduling are two separate steps: ParkMyAWS finds every EC2 and RDS resource in a connected account, but nothing gets touched until someone manually assigns it to a schedule, so a database left unassigned simply keeps running as normal.
No — the cross-account role never touches S3, database contents, or application data at all; it uses no long-lived access keys, and trust can be switched off instantly from the AWS console if a team ever wants to pull it.
No — stopping an EC2 instance preserves its EBS volumes and data, and RDS databases retain all data when stopped, since ParkMyAWS calls the same standard AWS stop/start APIs a user would trigger manually.
Schedule Pausing handles that directly from the dashboard — pause the resource's schedule with one click, and it stays running until the schedule is manually resumed.
The DIY route is free but not maintenance-free — the site notes a Lambda + EventBridge setup means self-hosting IAM roles, cron logic, failure handling, and monitoring, versus ParkMyAWS's 5-minute managed setup with no infrastructure to maintain.
