Vector Databases · pricing · Updated November 2026
Pinecone pricing (2026)
Pinecone's paid plans start at $20/mo (Builder) as checked on 2026-11-01, read from Pinecone's own pricing page; 5 plans. Best for Production RAG applications needing fully managed serverless scale. Every figure below links to its source and the date we captured it.
At a glance
- Entry price: $20/mo (Builder)
- Free tier: Yes
- Compliance: HIPAA Yes · SOC 2 Yes · GDPR Yes
- Best for: Production RAG applications needing fully managed serverless scale; Teams requiring HIPAA compliance for health data workloads; Enterprises needing multi-cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) vector search
As of · every figure below links to its source
Pinecone plans & pricing
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Billing | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $0 | — | Flat monthly | 2 GB storage, 2M write units/mo, 1M read units/mo. Assistant: 500K input tokens, 300K output tokens, 500K context tokens, 1K ingestion units/mo. Inference: 5M embedding tokens, 500 reranking requests/mo. AWS us-east-1 only. No HIPAA. | pinecone.io |
| Builder | $20 | — | Flat monthly | 10 GB storage, 5M write units/mo, 2M read units/mo. Assistant: 2M input tokens, 1M output tokens, 2M context tokens, 10K ingestion units. Inference: 10M embedding tokens, 1K reranking requests. SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001. AWS only (multi-cloud 'coming soon'). No HIPAA. | pinecone.io |
| Standard | $50 | — | Custom / quote | $50/mo minimum; pay-as-you-go beyond minimum. Storage $0.33/GB/mo. Write units $4–$4.50/M, read units $16–$18/M. HIPAA available as $190/mo add-on. Backup/restore included. AWS, Azure, GCP all regions. | pinecone.io |
| Enterprise | $500 | — | Custom / quote | $500/mo minimum; pay-as-you-go with tiered rates beyond minimum. HIPAA compliance included (no add-on fee). Premium support included. Unlimited storage and usage with tiered pricing. AWS, Azure, GCP. | pinecone.io |
| Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) | not priced monthly | — | Custom / quote | Custom pricing. Deploy Pinecone in your own cloud account. Contact sales. | pinecone.io |
Last verified 2026-11-01. https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/ accessed 2026-06-14. Pricing confirmed via two independent fetches. Builder $20/mo flat confirmed. Standard $50/mo min confirmed. Enterprise $500/mo min confirmed. HIPAA add-on $190/mo on Standard confirmed; HIPAA included on Enterprise. Cross-checked against benchmark.vectorview.ai.
Price changes
Price on record
$20/moFirst on record 2026-10-16
A new dated entry is stamped here each time the price moves — the record builds itself.
Tracked since October 2026. No change record has cleared two sources yet, so nothing is published on the wire.
Capabilities
Integrations: LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI, Cohere, Snowflake, Datadog, Airbyte, Vercel.
Key features: Serverless vector database with pay-per-use read/write units; Sparse-dense hybrid search (BM25 + dense vectors); Pinecone Assistant for RAG (built-in chunking, embedding, retrieval); Private endpoints and customer-managed encryption keys (KMS); 99.95% uptime SLA with cross-region replication.
Plan limits: Starter: 2 GB storage, 2M write units/mo, 1M read units/mo, AWS us-east-1 only, no HIPAA; Builder: 10 GB storage, 5M write units/mo, 2M read units/mo, no HIPAA; HIPAA available as $190/mo add-on on Standard; included on Enterprise.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Pinecone cost?
Pinecone's paid plans start at $20/mo (Builder), and it lists a $0 plan (Starter); it has 5 published plans. Verified 2026-11-01.
What are cheaper alternatives to Pinecone?
Cheaper vector databases than Pinecone (entry $20/mo) include Redis Cloud at $5/mo, MongoDB Atlas Vector Search at $8/mo. Verified 2026-11-01.
Does Pinecone support HIPAA?
Yes — Pinecone states HIPAA support on its public pages. Its public pages also state SOC 2 and GDPR compliance.
Does Pinecone have a free plan?
Yes — Pinecone publishes a free tier.
Pinecone vs alternatives
Compare all vector databases · Pinecone alternatives · SOC 2 claims in vector databases · HIPAA claims in vector databases · GDPR claims in vector databases · Open data · MCP
Cheaper vector databases alternatives
- MongoDB Atlas Vector Search from $8/mo
- Redis Cloud from $5/mo
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Related categories
This standing as a plaque
Pinecone currently holds a silver deskmark here — Rank 3 of 7 · Vector Databases. Anyone may show it. There is nothing to apply for, nothing to pay, and displaying it changes no score: the standing comes from the published algorithm, which never reads commission data. We never ask anyone to show it, and its link carries rel="nofollow".
The image is drawn from our live data, so it follows the standing rather than freezing it: if Pinecone moves up or down a tier, the plaque on your own site says so at our next publish. Nothing is tracked beyond the ordinary web-server log that records any image request.