Cloud & Architecture · Freemium

Pinecone

Pinecone is a fully managed vector database used to store and search embeddings for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, recommendations and AI agent memory. It runs as a serverless service backed by distributed object storage, so developers create indexes and send data without managing servers, shards or replicas. Pinecone supports dense, sparse and full-text indexes, which lets teams combine semantic similarity with keyword matching in hybrid search. Data inside an index can be split into namespaces, a common way to give each user, customer or agent its own isolated memory space. Namespace limits depend on the plan: 100 per index on Starter, 1,000 on Builder, 100,000 on Standard and 1,000,000 on Enterprise. Beyond the database, Pinecone offers Inference (hosted embedding and reranking models), Pinecone Assistant (a managed service for chat and agent applications over your documents), Dedicated Read Nodes for workloads that need reserved query capacity, and Bring Your Own Cloud deployments that run Pinecone inside a customer's own cloud account. It also publishes pg_pinecone, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Pinecone search into Postgres. Pricing as of Nov 4, 2026, from Pinecone's official pricing page: the Starter plan is free, with up to 2 GB storage, 2 million write units and 1 million read units a month in AWS us-east-1. Builder costs $20 a month flat with higher limits and a choice of cloud and region. Standard has a $50 monthly minimum, after which usage is pay-as-you-go: $0.33 per GB per month for storage, $4 to $4.50 per million write units and $16 to $18 per million read units, varying by cloud and region. Enterprise has a $500 monthly minimum and adds a 99.95% uptime SLA, private endpoints, customer-managed encryption keys and audit logs. Support plans range from free to $250 a month for Pro. Pinecone runs on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure and is also sold through those cloud marketplaces. It is a common default for teams that want a managed retrieval stack with embeddings, reranking and storage on one bill. Metarix covers Pinecone in its vector database comparisons for AI agents.