by Pinecone Systems, Inc.Vector databases
A serverless vector database billed by read units, write units and storage, with a free Starter tier, a $20 Builder plan and Standard from a $50 monthly minimum.
A serverless vector index with hybrid search, hosted models, backups and bulk import on a plan bought online, with no servers or replicas to size.
Pinecone runs the index for you and bills by use: you do not pick node sizes or replicas, and Standard charges reads, writes and storage above a $50 monthly minimum. Dense, sparse and full-text search, metadata filtering, namespaces and hosted embedding and reranking models are on every plan. Standard, bought online, adds scheduled backups, bulk import from S3, GCS or Azure Blob, RBAC, SAML SSO and, for $190 a month, a HIPAA BAA with audit logs, on top of SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001.
Against 3 other products we reviewed in Vector databases: what you pay for with each, the five access facts, the plan limits we recorded and each review's bottom line. The note under the table says how each one was checked.
| Metric | Pinecone | Zilliz Cloud | Qdrant Cloud | Weaviate Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you're paying for | Saves engineering timeA serverless vector index with hybrid search, hosted models, backups and bulk import on a plan bought online, with no servers or replicas to size. | Saves engineering timeManaged Milvus with a serverless option billed per request, free bulk import from object storage, and the Apache 2.0 engine as a way out. | Worth the priceA managed open-source vector engine on nodes you size, with no per-query charge, an exit to self-hosted Qdrant and a free cluster for about 1M vectors. | Saves engineering timeThe open-source Weaviate engine run for you, with hybrid search, RBAC and multi-tenancy on every plan and no per-query or per-write charges. |
| Overall score | 6.8 | 7.2Best | 7.0 | 6.2 |
| Free option | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan |
| Card to start | –Not measured | No card needed | No card needed | No card needed |
| Getting access | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve |
| Starter priceCheapest paid plan | $20/mo | $4/million vCUs | $0.03566/node-hour | $45/mo minimum |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based |
| Pricing page | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices |
| Billing unit | Read units, write units and GB-month of storage (serverless) | Serverless: vCUs and GB-month; Dedicated: CU-hours and GB-month | Provisioned nodes per hour (RAM, vCPU and disk), plus backup storage | Vector dimensions, GiB of storage and GiB of backup, for each of 3 replicas |
| Free option | Starter free tier (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day Standard trial with $300 in credits | Free 5 GB cluster, no card; $100 trial credits for 30 days | Free 1 GB cluster (about 1M 768-dimension vectors), no card | Free cluster (100,000 objects), no card |
| Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries) | $176.60/mo on Standard, computed | $113.28/mo on Serverless (GCP us-west1), computed | $102.51/mo on Standard (3 × mx1 nodes), official calculator | $255/mo on Flex, official calculator |
| Plan minimum | Builder $20 flat; Standard $50; Enterprise $500 a month | None | None on Standard; Premium minimum not published | Flex $45 a month; Premium through sales |
| Hybrid search | Every plan (dense, sparse and full-text indexes) | Every plan (BM25 full-text plus vector) | Every plan (dense plus sparse or BM25) | Every plan (BM25F plus vector, fused) |
| Backups | Standard and up, scheduled; $0.10 per GB-month | Dedicated clusters; point-in-time recovery on Business Critical | Standard and up, scheduled; collection snapshots on every plan | Daily on Flex, kept 7 days; restore through support |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 | SOC 2 Type II (under NDA) and ISO 27001:2022 | SOC 2 Type II; ISO 27001 not stated | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 (Markdown copy of the security page) |
| HIPAA BAA | Standard add-on $190/mo (6-month minimum); included on Enterprise | Business Critical, through sales | From Standard; BAA scope through Solutions Engineering | Premium Dedicated, through sales |
| EU regions | AWS Ireland and Frankfurt, GCP Netherlands, from Builder | Serverless in AWS Frankfurt; Dedicated in AWS, GCP and Azure EU regions | AWS Frankfurt and Ireland, GCP Frankfurt, Azure Germany West Central | Region selection on Dedicated tiers; EU regions not named |
| SSO | SAML on Standard and Enterprise | SAML or OIDC on Enterprise and up | Premium (console sign-in) | SAML on Premium |
| BYOC | Enterprise only, priced by sales | Through sales, annual commitment | Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud, through sales | Named on the security page; through sales |
| Data export | List and fetch API; no bulk export | SDK iterators; backup file export in private preview | Downloadable snapshots; scroll API | Cursor API; Parquet export not available on Cloud |
| Self-host path | None (Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026) | Milvus (Apache 2.0), same SDKs | Qdrant open source (Apache 2.0), restore from snapshot | Weaviate open source (BSD-3-Clause; some enterprise features licensed separately) |
| Bottom line | From its public pages, Pinecone puts the most on a self-serve plan here: hybrid search, backups, bulk import, SAML SSO and a HIPAA add-on all on Standard. Query cost grows with namespace size, and there is no open-source engine to fall back on. | From its public pages, Zilliz Cloud is managed Milvus with per-request serverless billing, free bulk import, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and an open-source exit. Serverless runs in two regions only, and several prices differ between its pages. | From its public pages, Qdrant Cloud is managed open-source Qdrant billed by node-hour: no per-query charge, a large free cluster and a documented way back to self-hosting. Prices live in the calculator, and SSO and private networking need Premium. | From its public pages, Weaviate Cloud is the managed form of an open-source engine, billed by what you store with three replicas included. Enterprise controls sit on Premium through sales, and its rates are easiest to read through the calculator. |
Evidence: Pinecone: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Zilliz Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Qdrant Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Weaviate Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run. Prices in USD as listed, excluding tax. "–" means not recorded.
Review from public pages
Written from Pinecone's public pages (pricing, security or privacy, and docs) as read on Oct 16, 2026. We did not sign up, and no hands-on run is published yet.
We read Pinecone's pricing page and its official cost estimator, the docs on cost, billing, limits, backups, import, security and BYOC, the 2026 release notes, the Master Subscription Agreement and DPA, and the trust center on Oct 16, 2026; we did not sign up, start the trial or call the API. The pricing page served US dollars from our location.
The model is clear once you read the cost docs: a query uses 1 read unit (RU) per GB of the namespace it searches, at least 0.25, and an upsert uses 1 write unit (WU) per KB, at least 5, plus the size of any record it replaces. The pricing page shows RU and WU prices only as ranges that "vary by cloud and region" ($16–$18 and $4–$4.50 per million on Standard); the estimator applies $16 and $4 with no region choice, so we used those.
A few points differ between pages. Audit logs are Enterprise only on the pricing page, while the docs also include them in the $190 HIPAA add-on on Standard; private endpoints are AWS only on one docs page and AWS or Azure on another. Pinecone Local, the Docker emulator, reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026, and multi-factor sign-in is marked "Coming Soon".
Dense, sparse and full-text indexes are listed on every plan, Starter included, and BM25 full-text search became generally available on Sep 2, 2026, all billed in the same read and write units.
vs Weaviate Cloud: Weaviate Cloud and Qdrant Cloud also include hybrid search on every plan, but bill by stored dimensions or provisioned nodes rather than per query.
Scheduled backups ($0.10 per GB-month, restore $0.15 per GB) and import from S3, GCS or Azure Blob ($0.25 per GB) start on Standard, bought online.
vs Weaviate Cloud: Weaviate Cloud and Qdrant Cloud document no import from object storage into their managed services.
SAML SSO, RBAC and API keys scoped by role are on Standard, from a $50 monthly minimum.
vs Weaviate Cloud: Weaviate Cloud and Qdrant Cloud put SAML SSO on Premium, a committed plan arranged with sales.
Standard adds HIPAA for $190 a month with a 6-month minimum, including a BAA and audit logs; Enterprise includes it.
Every query is billed 1 RU per GB of the namespace it searches, so a 7.14 GB namespace costs about 7 RU per query. Splitting data into namespaces, for example by tenant, lowers it.
Workaround: Dedicated Read Nodes bill a fixed hourly rate instead of read units; their rates appear in the cost estimator.
Builder ($20 flat) stops at 10 GB, 5M write units and 2M read units a month and returns errors beyond them; there is no overage on that plan.
Workaround: Standard bills usage above its $50 minimum and keeps serving reads.
There is no open-source engine; Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026, and BYOC needs the Enterprise plan, with a platform fee and node rate that are not published.
The pricing page lists RU and WU prices as ranges by cloud and region with no per-region table, and the cross-region restore rate is not published.
Workaround: The cost estimator applies $16 per million RU and $4 per million WU on Standard.
Pinecone bills serverless usage: storage $0.33 per GB-month, write units from $4 per million and read units from $16 per million on Standard (Enterprise from $6 and $24), above a $50 monthly minimum ($500 on Enterprise). For our scenario, 1M queries on a 7.14 GB namespace use 7.14M RU ($114.24), 1M upserts that replace 7.14 KB records use 15 WU each, 15M WU ($60), and storage is $2.36: $176.60 a month (computed). Builder ($20 flat) holds the data but blocks reads above 2M RU a month. Costs rise with namespace size, backups ($0.10 per GB-month), import ($0.25 per GB), egress beyond 100 GB ($0.10 per GB), the HIPAA add-on ($190) and paid support (Developer $29, Pro $250 a month).
Records leave through the API: list returns up to 100 IDs per call and fetch up to 1,000 records, both billed in read units. There is no bulk export to object storage, and backups stay in the same project and region. Downgrading deletes backups and collections; after termination the MSA allows retrieval for up to 30 days on written request. With no open-source engine, moving out means loading the data into another database.
From its public pages, Pinecone puts the most on a self-serve plan here: hybrid search, backups, bulk import, SAML SSO and a HIPAA add-on all on Standard. Query cost grows with namespace size, and there is no open-source engine to fall back on.
| Limit | As recorded |
|---|---|
| Billing unit | Read units, write units and GB-month of storage (serverless) |
| Free option | Starter free tier (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day Standard trial with $300 in credits |
| Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries) | $176.60/mo on Standard, computed |
| Plan minimum | Builder $20 flat; Standard $50; Enterprise $500 a month |
| Hybrid search | Every plan (dense, sparse and full-text indexes) |
| Backups | Standard and up, scheduled; $0.10 per GB-month |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 |
| HIPAA BAA | Standard add-on $190/mo (6-month minimum); included on Enterprise |
| EU regions | AWS Ireland and Frankfurt, GCP Netherlands, from Builder |
| SSO | SAML on Standard and Enterprise |
| BYOC | Enterprise only, priced by sales |
| Data export | List and fetch API; no bulk export |
| Self-host path | None (Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026) |
Read from the vendor's public pages on Oct 16, 2026. No hands-on run is published yet. How we check
We have not published a sign-up run for Pinecone yet. The access facts above were read from its sign-up and pricing pages on Oct 16, 2026.
We have not published API calls for Pinecone yet.
Pinecone lists 4 plans. The cheapest paid plan, Builder (flat, usage capped), costs $20/mo.
Prices as listed, USD, excluding tax; observed 2026-10-16.
Source: pinecone.io pricing page. Prices change; the observed date above is when our agent read them.
We read the pricing pages, calculators, trust, legal and documentation pages of three managed vector databases on the same day and scored them on the same six indicators. What 1M vectors and 1M queries a month cost, where backups, SSO and HIPAA sit, how you get your data out, and who should pick which.
