AWS RDS, while initially appearing cost-effective, can become expensive at scale due to its rigid architecture, which requires separate instances for each environment and provisions storage and compute for peak usage without flexibility. This leads to inflated costs as teams pay for full-size instances even during idle times and cannot reduce storage volumes after they are scaled. Snapshots, the primary backup solution, are costly and slow for recovery. In contrast, Neon offers a serverless Postgres platform designed to address these inefficiencies by separating storage and compute, enabling autoscaling, and allowing instant, lightweight database branches that do not duplicate storage. This model allows for economical scaling, dynamic storage adjustments, and instant point-in-time restores, ultimately providing a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to RDS for managing large-scale Postgres databases.