Pinecone pricing 2026: plans and costs
How AI answers describe Pinecone pricing
As of November 2026, Qdrant, Weaviate, and Pinecone are among the vector databases with publicly accessible pricing.
Compared to: Qdrant · Weaviate · PostgreSQL
- Pinecone — three-week Standard-plan trial with $300 in credits.
Quick pricing summary
- Starter: $0 free
- Builder: $20 month flat
- Standard: $50 month minimum usage
- Enterprise: $500 month minimum usage
- Worth noting: Plans with a monthly minimum are billed pay-as-you-go once usage exceeds the minimum. Per-million and per-GB rates vary by cloud and region. Egress and inference allowances are listed per plan on the pricing page.
Plans
Starter
$0 free
- Free tier for trying out and small applications
- Pinecone Database On-Demand, Inference, and Assistant
- Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes
- Console Metrics
- Community support via Discord
- Up to 2 GB database storage
- Up to 1 project and 2 users
Builder
$20 month flat
- Everything in Starter
- Increased usage limits
- Choose your cloud and region
- Multiple projects and users
- Prometheus and Datadog monitoring
- Free support included
- Response SLAs via Developer or Pro support add-on
Standard
$50 month minimum usage
- Everything in Builder
- Pay-as-you-go above the $50 monthly minimum
- 3 week trial includes $300 credits
- Dedicated Read Nodes
- Import from object storage
- Backup and Restore
- RBAC
- SSO (SAML 2.0)
- HIPAA add-on
- Free support included
Enterprise
$500 month minimum usage
- Everything in Standard
- 99.95% Uptime SLA
- Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
- Private Endpoints
- Customer Managed Encryption Keys
- Audit Logs
- Service Accounts
- SAML roles and SCIM
- HIPAA Compliance
- Pro support included
What you get on each plan
| Feature | Starter | Builder | Standard | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Index types | Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text | Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text | Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text | Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text |
| Indexes | Up to 5 | 10 per project | 20 per project | 200 per project |
| Namespaces per index | 100 | 1,000 | 100,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Dedicated Read Nodes | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Uptime SLA 99.95% | — | — | — | ✓ |
| RBAC | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| SSO (SAML 2.0) | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Private Endpoints | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Customer Managed Encryption Keys | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Audit Logs | — | — | — | ✓ |
| HIPAA | — | — | add-on | ✓ |
| Projects | 1 | 5 | 20 | 100 |
| Users | Up to 2 | Up to 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Support | Community via Discord | Free support included | Free support included | Pro support included |
Hidden costs & add-ons
| Cost driver | Price | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| HIPAA add-on | $190/mo | Standard |
Pinecone pricing vs alternatives
| Brand | Entry price | Free plan | Model | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinecone | Free; paid from $20 / mo | Yes | Usage-based | — | |
| Qdrant | Contact sales | Yes | Usage-based | Developers and teams building RAG, semantic search and recommendation systems that need hybrid search and metadata filtering, either self-hosted or managed | Compare → |
| Weaviate | Free; paid from $45 / mo | Yes | Usage-based | Development teams and enterprises building search, RAG and agent applications who want an open-source, production-ready vector database. | Compare → |
| PostgreSQL | — | — | — | — | Compare → |
| Chroma | Free; paid from $250 / mo | Yes | Usage-based | Developers building retrieval-augmented generation prototypes, who get a fast start locally, and teams that later need a managed or self-hosted search system. | Compare → |
List prices as published on www.pinecone.io/pricing/. Totals are worked examples, not quotes.