AWS vs Neon DB

• AWS RDS locks you into a monthly floor of $11.68/mo for 1 GB of RAM, while Neon provides a free tier and scales up to 16 GB for $69.00/mo.
• Storage overages on Neon are significantly more expensive at $0.35/GB, compared to the $0.12/GB rate charged by AWS RDS.
• Egress fees remain relatively stable across both platforms, with AWS RDS charging $0.09/GB and Neon charging $0.10/GB.
• Neon allows for smaller vCPU allocations starting at 0.25 vCPU, whereas AWS RDS maintains a baseline of 2 vCPU cores regardless of memory tier.

AWS RDS uses traditional block storage volumes that provide consistent performance profiles, which is beneficial for legacy applications requiring predictable IOPS on provisioned instances. Because AWS RDS forces a 2 vCPU minimum, you end up paying for idle compute power if your database workload is primarily read-heavy or infrequently accessed. Neon decouples storage from compute, which allows for rapid scaling but shifts the cost profile toward storage consumption. Relying on Neon for large datasets quickly becomes expensive due to the $0.35/GB overage rate, making it less attractive for long-term archival of massive schemas compared to the cheaper storage rates found in the AWS ecosystem.

Choosing between these platforms depends on how your database handles growth. AWS RDS is the standard for stable, high-uptime production environments where you have a firm grasp on total data volume and want to avoid the high per-gigabyte tax on persistent storage. Neon is better suited for ephemeral development environments or applications where the ability to scale RAM up to 16 GB without a high entry cost outweighs the long-term risk of storage-related billing spikes. AWS keeps the infrastructure predictable, while Neon optimizes for flexible, bursty resource allocation.