A lightweight solution for starting/stoppping EC2 by cron schedule.
Depends on boto and croniter.
This is not expected to work out of the box, however it may.
Attach autostate tag to the instance with the value in format is_enabled:start_cron:start_cron, where is_managed is a true-ish value (see here) to have the instance state managed. start_cron and stop_cron should be valid cron expressions.
Example:
autostate = "Yes:5 * * * *:10 * * * *"
Attach uri tag with the value in format subdomain_zone, to have the instance's Route 53 record updated on instance state changes.
Example:
uri = "service_mycopr.example.com"
Run the ec2_scheduler.py periodically wherever you like.
A good option would be AWS Lambda.