Cloud computing plays a significant role in everyone’s lifestyle by snugly linking communities, information, and trades across the globe. Due to its NP-hard nature, recognizing the optimal solution for workflow scheduling in the cloud is a challenging area. We proposed a hybrid meta-heuristic cost-effective load-balanced approach to schedule workflow in a heterogeneous environment. Our model is based on a genetic algorithm integrated with predict earliest finish time (PEFT) to minimize makespan. Instead of assigning the task randomly to a virtual machine, we apply a greedy strategy that assigns the task to the lowest-loaded virtual machine. After completing the mutation operation, we verify the dependency constraint instead of each crossover operation, which yields a better outcome. The proposed model incorporates the virtual machine’s performance variance as well as acquisition delay, which concedes the minimum makespan and computing cost. One of the most astounding aspects of our cost-effective hybrid genetic algorithm (CHGA) is its capacity to anticipate by creating an optimistic cost table (OCT) while maintaining quadratic time complexity. Based on the results of our meticulous experiments on some real-world workflow benchmarks and comprehensive analysis of some recently successful scheduling algorithms, we concluded that the performance of our CHGA is melodious. CHGA is 14.58188%, 11.40224%, 11.75306%, and 9.78841% cheaper than standard Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Cost Effective Genetic Algorithm(CEGA), and Cost-Effective Load-balanced Genetic Algorithm (CLGA), respectively.