In the fiercely competitive cloud market, introducing new functionality and price cuts on a regular basis is a requisite to staying on top of the market. Amazon Inc. ticked the box this week by adding a new billing option to its Workspaces virtual desktop service that allows organizations to rent instances by the hour.

While it may seem like a small addition at first, the feature can provide major savings over the default “AlwaysOn” subscription that has been available until now. The latter plan makes it possible to rent virtual desktops for a fixed monthly fee that is fairly economic if workers make continuous use of their Workspaces, but quickly becomes inefficient otherwise. The new hourly option enables large enterprises to more cost-efficiently support the upwards of hundreds of staffers on their payroll who don’t use their desktops regularly.

That includes jet-setting executives, salespeople tasked with representing their companies at industry conferences and technicians who do much of their work at client sites. Then there also workers who stay in the office for the most part but only require a virtual desktop occasionally for training purposes or some other infrequent activity. Amazon hopes that addressing the requirements of this segment will make Workspaces more competitive against the numerous rival virtual desktop vendors out there. The company is competing both with fellow cloud providers and traditional VDI software suppliers that focus on in-house deployments.

On-demand WorkSpaces instances are available from as little as $0.22 per hour and can be shut down automatically once they’re no longer needed. An organization may set its desktops to go offline as soon as an hour after employees disconnect or up to two days later. Amazon says that when a worker needs to access their virtual desktop again, they’re able to boot the instance within 90 seconds and immediately start using the applications they left running in the previous session.

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