Pinecone pricing: Features and plans explained + how they built it

Pinecone is a managed vector database designed for building high-performance AI applications. Its pricing reflects a mix of tiered plans and usage-based costs for storage, operations, and advanced features like inference and assistants.

In this guide, we’ll break down Pinecone’s plans, features, and costs, explain key elements of its pricing model, and show how usage-based billing supports AI-driven growth.

Note: For the most up-to-date pricing, check Pinecone’s pricing page. Plan details and rates can change over time.

What are Pinecone's pricing models? 

Pinecone offers a variety of pricing models to cater to different needs and use cases, from experimentation to large-scale production deployments. Let's take a look at the options.  

Product pricing

Pinecone offers four main plans: Starter (Free), Standard, Enterprise, and Dedicated (BYOC). All paid plans combine minimum monthly usage commitments with pay-as-you-go rates for actual usage beyond those minimums.

• Starter: Includes 2 GB of index storage, 2 million write units, 1 million read units, and access to most embedding and reranking models.
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• Standard: The Standard plan has a $50/month minimum, with rates like $0.33/GB/month for storage, $4 per million write units, and $16 per million read units. It supports larger projects, SAML SSO, and backup/restore options.   
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• Enterprise: This plan starts at $500/month, with higher capacity limits, private networking, customer-managed encryption keys, and HIPAA compliance. Usage rates are $6 per million write units and $24 per million read units.
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• Dedicated: It offers bring-your-own-cloud deployment, private regions, and premium support, with custom pricing.

Support pricing

Besides product pricing, Pinecone offers support tiers to provide varying levels of assistance. These are the tiers:

• Free: This tier provides access to Pinecone's community forum, AI support bot, and documentation for free.
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• Developer: It adds service level agreements of priority response times from Pinecone Support for customers. This tier offers email support with a 1- to 3-business-day response time, access to their help desk, and all features from the Free tier. Pricing for this tier is $29 per month.
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• Pro: The Pro tier provides email support, 24/7 on-call availability, and features from previous tiers. It's priced at $499 per month. 
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• Enterprise: This tier offers the fastest response times, a dedicated Slack channel, and direct support. Since it's included with the Enterprise plan, support pricing is bundled into the custom pricing.  

Inference pricing

Pinecone offers hosted inference models for embedding generation and reranking. These services are billed based on token usage. Here’s a quick look at the tiers:

• Starter: This plan includes 5 million tokens per month at no cost, ideal for testing embedding and reranking workflows without setting up custom infrastructure.
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• Standard: The Standard plan charges $0.08 per million tokens, with no platform fee or usage minimum. This rate applies to both input and output tokens when calling Pinecone-hosted models like Cohere Embed or Pinecone Rerank.
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• Enterprise: Enterprise customers receive the same $0.08 per million token rate, with the option to negotiate volume discounts through a custom contract. Support for inference APIs is integrated into the main support plan.

Assistant pricing

Assistant is available on all plans with plan-based limits. Starter projects include Assistant with limits such as max 3 assistants, 1 GB file storage, 1.5M total LLM processed tokens, and 64k max input tokens per query. See pricing and limits for the full table.

Standard and Enterprise bill Assistant usage by hours, tokens, and storage. Pinecone’s GA post states usage starts at $0.05 per assistant hour, and Context Processed Tokens are $5 per 1M for Standard and Enterprise users.

Real-world benefits of Pinecone’s pricing for their clients

Here are the advantages that Pinecone’s customers have with each pricing option:

• The Starter plan gives up to 2GB of storage space for indexes. It also includes free usage each month. People often use this plan when they're testing out their AI projects.
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• The Standard plan lets you pay based on what you actually use, with a minimum of $50 per month. You don't have to pay a big amount upfront. Instead, you just pay as you go. This makes it work well when you're running real applications that customers use.
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• Support options come in Developer and Pro levels. Each one promises different response times and gives you access to special support channels. You can pick the support level that matches what your team needs to keep things running smoothly.

Key elements of Pinecone’s pricing structure

Pinecone’s pricing blends tiered plan features with granular, usage-based billing for core resources.

• Minimum commitments + pay-as-you-go: Paid plans include a set monthly commitment, with costs scaling directly with usage beyond that amount.
  
  
• Clear resource metering: Pricing is tied to measurable units like GB of storage, read/write units, and tokens processed for inference or assistants.
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• Add-on flexibility: Customers can add capacity for endpoints, backups, or assistants as needed, without changing base plans.
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• Enterprise-grade controls: Higher-tier plans add compliance, security, and support features.
  

Remember: Pricing, plans, and features are subject to change. For the most up-to-date information, always refer to Pinecone’s pricing page.

Why do companies like Pinecone adopt usage-based billing?

Vector database companies and AI infrastructure providers often choose usage-based billing because their customers’ workloads vary dramatically over time. Fixed, seat-based pricing doesn’t reflect the way these systems are actually used.

Key reasons this model works for AI infrastructure:

• Costs fluctuate with vector operations: Storage, read/write units, and inference tokens all scale up or down depending on the volume of data processed and queries run.
  
  
• Value isn’t tied to seat count: In AI applications, usage is driven by compute and data needs rather than the number of people accessing the system.
  
  
• Usage spikes are unpredictable: Training cycles, model updates, and production launches can cause sudden surges in demand that are difficult to plan for with flat-rate pricing.
  
  
• Serverless architecture fits pay-as-you-go: Customers don’t pre-provision resources, so billing follows real consumption.

Pro tip: For teams designing usage-based pricing for AI agents or other complex services, this free downloadable guide breaks down key strategies and metrics. You can also follow our implementation walkthrough to see how easy it is to set up pricing in Orb.

How Pinecone built a modern billing system with Orb

As Pinecone expanded its offerings, from vector database to inference and assistant APIs, its in-house billing system couldn’t keep up. It didn’t support multi-product billing or complex metering, and in some cases, they had to calculate invoices manually. 

Different teams saw inconsistent usage data, making it harder to get a clear picture of customer activity. With a major product launch approaching, Pinecone needed a single source of truth for usage and billing, automated invoicing, and the flexibility to adapt pricing quickly. 

Building a new billing platform internally would have required hiring a team and delaying product rollouts.

How Orb helped

Pinecone implemented Orb in just three months, first testing data accuracy against their legacy system before fully switching over. Orb provided:

• A unified, API-driven billing platform that consolidated costs for multiple products.
  
• Accurate usage data accessible to engineering, finance, and customer success.
  
• Automated invoicing that removed the need for manual calculations.
  
• Plan version control and the ability to launch new pricing models without engineering bottlenecks.

The outcome

Today, Pinecone uses Orb as its source of truth for all usage and billing data. Cross-functional teams share the same, accurate customer metrics, improving decision-making and reporting to leadership. 

Automation has eliminated manual billing tasks, freeing engineering resources and avoiding the cost of building an in-house replacement. With Orb, Pinecone can launch new products, adjust pricing, and scale to enterprise demand with confidence.

Note: Learn more by reading our full Pinecone case study.

How Orb can support your pricing engine

For businesses adopting usage-based pricing strategies (including usage billing, tiered plans, or custom metrics), Orb provides a solution that helps you take your pricing to the next level. 

Orb is a done-for-you billing platform that allows companies to design and manage sophisticated pricing models, just like Pinecone and other leading technology companies. We handle the complexities of usage-based pricing and many other pricing strategies. 

Here's how Orb can help with your usage-based pricing structure:

• Usage tracking: Orb ingests raw event data, providing the foundation for accurate invoicing and flexible pricing. This feature makes it possible to set up complex, multifaceted pricing structures for products like vector databases.
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• Tiered plans: Orb enables you to create and manage many pricing tiers. This feature allows companies to cater to many customer segments.
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• Data-driven insights: Orb transforms usage data into actionable insights. We give you a clear understanding of customer behavior to refine your pricing strategy.
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• Effortless integrations: Orb integrates with your existing data warehouses and accounting software. We help streamline your financial operations for a smooth billing process.
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• Customizable billing: Orb SQL Editor and Orb’s visual builder give you the freedom to define your own usage metrics and pricing rules. We aid you in creating a truly bespoke model that's ideal for your niche.

Ready to experience the power of Orb? Discover how we can help you build an innovative and effective pricing strategy. Make sure to check out our flexible pricing options and find your ideal plan to get started right away.