AWS RDS's rigid architecture can lead to inflated bills as teams scale their databases, with costs increasing due to the need for multiple environments, storage volumes that cannot be shrunk after scaling, and compute that is provisioned for peak usage but remains on 24/7. Neon, a serverless Postgres platform, breaks this pattern by separating storage and compute, enabling lightweight branches of the database that can be spun up instantly and automatically scale with demand, reducing costs and improving efficiency. With Neon's branching model, teams can create full-blown instances for staging or QA without incurring high costs, share storage to make dev environments affordable even at TB scale, and restore from any point in time in seconds, making it a modern alternative for scaling Postgres without the architectural baggage that translates into a cost spiral.