Well of course, if you pay for an hour, you might as well keep the instance running because you might need it before the hour is up, and you’ve already paid for

Well of course, if you pay for an hour, you might as well keep the instance running because you might need it before the hour is up, and you’ve already paid for it. That makes per-second a win/win. Amazon can slow the spend on new compute resource because of the financial incentive to avoid retaining idle resource.