Development, staging and QA ECS services and EC2 instances are commonly left running around the clock, even though they're only exercised during working hours. Nights, weekends and holidays add up to roughly 60-70% of the week where those environments sit idle - and you're paying full price the entire time. Runless automates the shutdown and restart of these non-production environments on a schedule, without touching production.
Business-hours automation
Define a schedule per ECS service or EC2 instance - off after hours and on weekends, back up automatically before the team starts work.
Manual override when it matters
A late-night deploy or an unplanned demo doesn't have to wait for the schedule - turn a resource on or off manually at any time, individually or in bulk.
Savings you can see
The dashboard tracks actual cost saved by comparing scheduled downtime against what the resource would have cost running continuously.
How it fits your setup
Runless is designed for non-production environments specifically - the recommendation is to keep production in a separate AWS account that stays always-on and out of scope entirely. Onboarding uses a scoped cross-account role with least-privilege permissions and external ID protection, set up through a Quick Start CloudFormation stack; most teams are fully connected in under 20 minutes. See the FAQ for the full permissions model, or dig into the specifics for ECS services and EC2 instances.