Pinecone pricing
How Pinecone charges, what to know before you commit, and what you'd pay at your usage — next to what the alternatives would cost for the same thing.
How it charges
Checked 2026-10-03 on www.pinecone.io ↗ · USD, list pricesServerless and usage-based: storage at $0.33/GB-month, $16 per million read units and $4 per million write units, with a free Starter plan, a $20 flat Builder plan and a $50 monthly minimum on Standard.
- Free plan
- Yes
- Cheapest paid plan
- $20/mo
- Side project
- $20/mo Builder
- Growing
- $113/mo Standard
- Scaling
- $246,427/mo Standard
What the model leaves out
Assumes 1,536-dimension float32 vectors with an 8-byte ID and no metadata: 6,152 bytes per record, 6.152 GB per million (Pinecone's size formula, decimal GB), all in one namespace. Storage = $2.03 per million vectors per month. Queries: RU per query = 6.152 × vectors_m (min 0.25) at $16/M RU — e.g. $98.43 per million queries at 1M vectors. Writes: 1 WU per KB of request, so about 6.15 WU per vector in batched upserts (the 5-WU per-request minimum is negligible for batches), = $24.61 per million writes at $4/M WU; updates of existing records cost roughly double. Rates are the low end of Pinecone's ranges ($16–18/M RU, $4–4.50/M WU, varying by cloud and region). The $50 Standard minimum is applied to queries only, so the model is exact when queries alone cost at least $50 and otherwise overstates by up to the storage and write charges. Starter (free: 2 GB, 1M RU, 2M WU, 1 GB egress a month, us-east-1 only) and Builder ($20 flat: 10 GB, 2M RU, 5M WU, 10 GB egress) caps are converted to vectors and queries with the same per-record sizes. Not modelled: egress ($0.10/GB beyond 100 GB on Standard — small when queries return IDs and scores only), backups, imports, Inference and Assistant. Bands stop at 100M vectors. Enterprise ($500 minimum, 1.5× unit rates) is left out.
- A query costs 1 read unit per GB of the namespace it searches (minimum 0.25 RU) — top_k and response size don't matter, so query cost grows with the data you store; splitting data into namespaces is how Pinecone says to cut it.
- Standard charges a $50 monthly minimum: if your usage comes to less, the invoice adds a line for the difference.
- Starter and Builder are flat: once you hit their storage, read, write or egress limits, requests are blocked (429) rather than billed — upgrade to keep serving.
- An upsert that overwrites an existing record also pays write units for the old record's size, so updates cost about twice a fresh insert.
| Plan | Monthly fee | Vectors stored | Queries per month | Vectors written or updated per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | up to 100k vectors | up to 1.6 million queries | up to 325.1k writes |
| ↳ next tier | up to 325.1k vectors | up to 500k queries | up to 325.1k writes | |
| Builder | $20/mo | up to 100k vectors | up to 3.3 million queries | up to 812.7k writes |
| ↳ next tier | up to 500k vectors | up to 650.2k queries | up to 812.7k writes | |
| ↳ next tier | up to 1 million vectors | up to 325.1k queries | up to 812.7k writes | |
| ↳ next tier | up to 1.6 million vectors | up to 200k queries | up to 812.7k writes | |
| Standard | $50/mo | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 100k vectors | 5.1 million queries includedthen $9.84 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes |
| ↳ next tier | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 500k vectors | 1 million queries includedthen $49.22 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes | |
| ↳ next tier | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 1 million vectors | 508k queries includedthen $98.43 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes | |
| ↳ next tier | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 5 million vectors | 101.6k queries includedthen $492.16 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes | |
| ↳ next tier | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 10 million vectors | 50.8k queries includedthen $984.32 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes | |
| ↳ next tier | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 50 million vectors | 10.2k queries includedthen $4921.6 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes | |
| ↳ next tier | $2.0302 per million vectorsup to 100 million vectors | 5.1k queries includedthen $9843.2 per million queries | $24.608 per million writes |
What you'd pay
Standard$50 plan + 1 million vectors × $2.0302 per million vectors + 492k queries × $98.43 per million queries + 500k writes × $24.608 per million writes$113/mo
Cost as you grow
All vector database pricing, compared →Which one fits your situation →