Pinecone vs Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) pricing
Both are in vector database apis. Pinecone is billed per read/write unit + storage; Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) is billed per compute-unit-hour + storage. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
PineconeFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- Starter: 2GB storage (~350K vectors), 1 index, no SLA
- Billed
- Per read/write unit + storage
- Best for
- Serverless vector search for production RAG
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Zilliz Cloud (Milvus)Free tier or trial
- Free tier
- 5GB storage + compute credits, permanent free tier
- Billed
- Per compute-unit-hour + storage
- Best for
- Managed Milvus at billion-vector scale
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Pinecone plans
| 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. |
- 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
Source: https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/
Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free (Serverless) | $0/month | Free serverless tier including ~5GB storage and a monthly vCU allowance; suitable for prototyping. Collections unlimited. |
| Serverless | Pay-as-you-go (from ~$0.35/M vCU) | Pay-per-operation model charged on read/write resource consumption plus storage; best for variable/low-traffic workloads. |
| Dedicated | From ~$99/month (compute + storage) | Reserved compute units (CU ~= 1 vCPU + 4GB RAM) at pay-as-you-go rates; 99.95% uptime SLA, production-grade performance and isolation. |
| Business Critical (BC) | Custom | Added Oct 2025 for teams with stringent security/compliance needs; enhanced isolation, support, and resilience. |
| BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) | Custom | Zilliz Cloud control plane operating inside the customer's own cloud account/VPC for data-residency and compliance requirements. |
- Cost is the most cited complaint, managed pricing can be far more expensive than self-hosting Milvus on a cheap VPS for small/hobby projects
- vCU / CU-hour + tiered-storage billing model can be hard to forecast and reason about
Source: https://zilliz.com/pricing