This repo contains a Cloudformation template to deploy an EC2 Instance for software development.
This will deploy a Amazon Linux EC2 instance, an Instance Profile granting admin access, and a cloudwatch alarm to turn off the instance after 3 hours of inactivity.
Write and deploy code!
I recommend making desired changes to this AMI and burning a new AMI with your preferred configurations built in. For example, you could install your favorite version of python, securely store credentials, configure your dotfiles.
Leaving this instance stopped for a month will incur about an $0.80 bill in us-east-1. The reason for this is the 8 GB EBS volume that is provisioned: $0.10 per GB-month of General Purpose SSD (gp2) provisioned storage - US East (Northern Virginia)
Small instances however, are very cheap to run. You can usually get a machine big enough for your development needs for under $0.01 an hour. Here is the EC2 Instance Pricing page.