We revisit rescaling methods for nonlinear elliptic and parabolic problems and show that, by suitable modifications, they may be used for nonlinearities that are not scale invariant even asymptotically and whose behavior can be quite far from power like. In this enlarged framework, by adapting the doubling-rescaling method from [37, 38], we show that the equivalence found there between universal estimates and Liouville theorems remains valid. In the parabolic case we also prove a Liouville type theorem for a rather large class of non scale invariant nonlinearities. This leads to a number of new results for non scale invariant elliptic and parabolic problems, concerning space or space-time singularity estimates, initial and final blow-up rates, universal and a priori bounds for global solutions, and decay rates in space and/or time. We illustrate our approach by a number of examples, which in turn give indication about the optimality of the estimates and of the assumptions.