Tool profile
Vector database for semantic search, retrieval pipelines, and production RAG applications.
RAG pipelines needing low-latency similarity search
Pinecone indexes embeddings for semantic search, recommendations, and RAG workloads with serverless On-Demand indexes, optional Dedicated Read Nodes, Inference (hosted embeddings/rerankers), and Assistant products.
Per pinecone.io/pricing (March 2026), Starter is free with documented included usage for trying small workloads (see plan comparison and example workload section—illustrative only). Standard charges a $50/month minimum usage commit; beyond included consumption you pay as you go, with a 3-week trial advertising $300 credits. Enterprise carries a $500/month minimum with 99.95% SLA, private networking, CMK, audit logs, service accounts, and Pro support included on the card. BYOC (bring your own cloud) is contact sales.
The detailed comparison table lists On-Demand storage about $0.33/GB-month, write/read units priced per million (tiers differ Starter vs Standard—see live table), Inference token pricing (e.g. ~$0.16/M tokens on one embedding row), Assistant storage and token meters, and a HIPAA add-on cited around $190/month in the matrix. Free tier allowances appear for Starter-class usage (storage and operation free pools—confirm current numbers in console).
Compare Weaviate Cloud, Qdrant Cloud, and pgvector on Postgres for different tradeoffs; compare managed OpenSearch k-NN when you already run AWS.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Minimums ($50 / $500) mean small idle projects still pay floor fees on Standard/Enterprise. Read/write units dominate hot indexes—use Pinecone’s pricing calculator. Inference and Assistant are separate meters from raw storage. For alternatives, pgvector is cheapest at small scale; Qdrant/Weaviate compete on OSS + cloud; AWS OpenSearch fits AWS credits.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Pricing snapshot
Pinecone's pricing page shows Starter as free, Standard with a $50 per month minimum usage commitment and a 3-week trial that includes $300 in credits, and Enterprise with a $500 per month minimum usage commitment. Database, Inference, and Assistant usage are then billed pay-as-you-go above those minimums, and BYOC is sales-led.
AgentOps
Free planAgent observability
Observability for AI agents with tracing, debugging, session visibility, and production monitoring.
Closer to agent observability than to model hosting or prompt tooling
