The short answer
Pinecone is billed per read/write unit + storage. It has a free tier: Starter: 2GB storage (~350K vectors), 1 index, no SLA. The paid plans we list start at $20/month flat (Builder).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $0/month | Free on-demand serverless database, Inference, Assistant, dense/sparse/full-text indexes, console metrics, community Discord support. |
| Builder | $20/month flat | Everything in Starter plus higher usage limits, multiple projects/users, and Prometheus + Datadog monitoring. |
| Standard | $50/month minimum usage | Pay-as-you-go pricing, Dedicated Read Nodes, backup/restore, RBAC, SAML SSO; 3-week trial with $300 credits. |
| Enterprise | $500/month minimum usage | Adds 99.95% uptime SLA, private networking, customer-managed encryption keys, audit logs, and Pro support. |
| Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) | Custom | Pinecone deployed in your own cloud account with zero-access operations and Pro support. |
How Pinecone bills you
The pricing model is per read/write unit + storage. The category-defining managed serverless vector DB with the most polished docs and pay-per-operation billing. Best suited to: serverless vector search for production rag.
What to watch for on the bill
- Consumption-based pricing is hard to predict; multiple reports of bills running 2.5-4x over budget at scale
- Serverless cold starts add 200-800ms latency on idle indexes and cannot be disabled on that tier
- $50/month minimum on Standard (introduced late 2025) and opaque capacity-fee mechanics surfacing after the fact
The pricing page we read
Source: https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Pinecone with alternatives
- Pinecone vs MongoDB Atlas Vector Search pricing
- Pinecone vs Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) pricing
- Pinecone vs Supabase Vector (pgvector) pricing
Other vector database apis: MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Zilliz Cloud (Milvus), Supabase Vector (pgvector), Qdrant Cloud, Weaviate Cloud.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Pinecone score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Pinecone pricing.