Real spot prices for the GPU and CPU instances that actually run AlphaFold, Boltz-2, RELION, GROMACS,
OpenFE, and friends — fetched live from the AWS spot price history API for us-east-1.
Spot is typically 50–80% off on-demand for biotech-relevant instances.
Match the instance you need to the VRAM your tool actually needs (30+ biotech tools).
End-to-end cost for AlphaDIA, Boltz-2, OpenFE RBFE, 30× WGS, cryo-EM, more.
12 workloads with the actual AWS spot bill, on real public datasets.
Biotech compute is bursty. You don’t run an FEP campaign 24/7 — you run one this week and the next campaign is in three weeks. That’s the workload shape AWS Spot was designed for: cheap capacity in exchange for “we can take it back with 2 minutes notice.”
For typical biotech workflows that checkpoint well (RELION, GROMACS via tpr/cpt files, OpenFE via leg-level restart, AlphaFold via per-input statelessness), an eviction means “resume from last checkpoint on a new node” — not “start over.” That’s why our $33 OpenFE TYK2 RBFE campaign survived three spot evictions with zero lost work.
The “Spot (lowest)” column shows the lowest current spot price across all us-east-1 availability zones, refreshed when this page is regenerated. Spot prices change every few minutes and vary by AZ, but the lowest-AZ price is usually what your scheduler (Karpenter, MIG, or vanilla SDK) targets first.
Production spot pricing rarely stays at the headline number for an entire 24-hour campaign. You should treat any savings figure as “±15% over the campaign lifetime.” The 80% savings on H100/H200 you see at the top of the table is real but spot evictions on p5/p5en instances are more frequent than on g5/g6 — the headline savings reflect the volatility.
The simplest pattern: pick the smallest instance whose GPU VRAM exceeds your tool’s recommended minimum, then pick the cheapest spot price across the family. Most biotech workloads do not need 8× H100. A single A10G handles RBFE, a single L4 handles AlphaFold-Multimer, four T4 handles cryo-ET STA.
If you’re scoping a real workload, the workflow cost calculator picks the instance for you and shows the total bill.
The “cheapest” instance is only useful if you can actually get one. Spot Placement Score (a different API) tells you the probability of fulfillment in a given AZ. In practice, biotech-friendly instances (g5.xlarge, g6.xlarge, c6i mids) have stable spot capacity in us-east-1. The newer p5en.48xlarge has tight capacity and a high eviction rate — great savings if you can grab one, painful if your campaign needs guaranteed uptime.
Prices and instance specs are AWS public pricing for us-east-1, Linux/UNIX, as of the snapshot
timestamp above. On-demand prices change rarely; spot prices change every few minutes. For an exact
quote, see aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing.