Scale-to-zero databases cost the least when an app is idle and lose their edge when it runs all day.
Neon, Turso and Cloudflare D1 offer real free tiers, while Aurora Serverless and PlanetScale lean toward provisioned pricing.
Our model puts a hobby app near $1.15 a month on Neon Launch and an always-on SaaS near $45.69, versus about $89.60 on Aurora Standard before I/O.
Storage keeps billing while compute sleeps, so delete old branches and unused data.