How Pinecone prices
Captured September 18, 2026 at 1440px wide.
Pinecone plans and prices
| Plan | Price | Billing |
|---|---|---|
| StarterFor trying out and for small applications. | Free | |
| BuilderFor solo developers and small teams. | $20 | /month flat |
| StandardHighlightedFor production applications at any scale. | $50 | /month min. usage |
| EnterpriseFor mission-critical production applications. | $500 | /month min. usage |
As printed on the page captured September 18, 2026.
How does Pinecone pricing work?
The value metric sits close to the resource: storage at '$0.33/GB/mo', Write Units at '$4-$4.50 per million' and Read Units at '$16-$18 per million' on Standard, each '(varies by cloud and region)', plus egress, backups, imports, Assistant tokens, embedding tokens and rerank requests on their own rates. Packaging moves from allowance to meter. Starter includes 'Up to 2 GB', 'Up to 2M/mo' write units and 'Up to 1M/mo' read units on AWS us-east-1, Builder raises those to 10 GB, 5M and 2M with cloud and region choice for a flat $20, Standard, tagged POPULAR, opens unlimited pay-as-you-go above a $50 minimum, and Enterprise adds a '99.95% Uptime SLA', BYOC, private endpoints, customer managed encryption keys and Pro support above a $500 minimum.
The motion is self-serve through every published tier, with sales for BYOC and commitments. Each card has its own CTA, 'Start for Free', 'Get Started', 'Start Free Trial' and 'Get Started' with 'Request Trial' on Enterprise, and Standard's trial carries '$300 credits' over three weeks. 'ALSO AVAILABLE ON YOUR CLOUD MARKETPLACE' with AWS, GCP and Microsoft sits beside the headline. The page runs from 'Start free, scale effortlessly' through the cards, a pricing calculator link, a BYOC panel, 'What you can build on the Starter plan', an 'Explore products' grid, a usage-based and committed use strip, a long comparison table, and a closing 'Start building knowledgeable AI today'.
Under the hood, the minimum-usage plan is a floor that converts to metered billing: 'You'll be charged a minimum of $50/month. Once your usage exceeds this amount, you'll pay as you go.' That gives Pinecone predictable revenue per production account while the bill scales with real reads and writes. Enterprise unit rates sit above Standard, $6-$6.75 for writes and $24-$27 for reads per million, which prices the SLA, Pro support and security controls into every unit consumed. Committed Use Contracts complete the picture: 'The larger your usage commitments, the greater your benefits', a discount curve negotiated against forecast spend.
What does Pinecone's pricing page do well?
- Each minimum-usage card explains the mechanic in one sentence: 'You'll be charged a minimum of $50/month. Once your usage exceeds this amount, you'll pay as you go.'
- 'What you can build on the Starter plan' converts read and write units into outputs, such as '~ 44K recommendations per day', with the input assumptions listed
- Builder at '$20/month flat' gives developers a fixed-price step between the free tier and metered Standard
- The comparison table pairs the included allowance with the metered rate in the same row, so upgrade math is visible
- Standard's 'Start Free Trial' is backed by a specific offer, '3 week trial includes $300 credits'
What does Pinecone's pricing page reveal about its pricing strategy?
- A monthly minimum that converts to pay-as-you-go sets a revenue floor per production account while the bill tracks real usage
- Enterprise unit rates above Standard put the cost of the SLA, Pro support and security controls into each read and write
- Rates that vary by cloud and region pass through the underlying infrastructure cost of each provider
- Committed Use Contracts trade larger commitments for bigger discounts, the path from metered usage to an annual deal
- A flat Builder plan gives a solo developer a predictable bill before the meter starts
Learn with Orb
- GuidePinecone pricing: Features and plans explained + how they built it Orb's buyer guide to Pinecone's plans and costs, and how the billing behind them was built. This page covers how the pricing page presents them.
- DocsConfiguring plans: minimums and plan phases Standard and Enterprise carry a $50 and $500 monthly minimum that turns into pay as you go above it; in Orb, that floor is a minimum, with any shortfall added to the invoice.
- GuideAn AI founder's guide to prepaid credits Committed Use Contracts trade larger commitments for bigger discounts; the guide covers how a commitment earns a better rate and how usage past it bills at an overage rate.
- ProductExperience Kit The worked Starter workloads turn read and write units into recommendations and searches per day; Experience Kit builds calculators like that on one source of pricing truth.
Questions about Pinecone pricing
How much does Pinecone cost?
Pinecone's pricing starts at $20/mo flat. The page shows 4 plans, including a free plan, with the top plan priced through sales.
What pricing model does Pinecone use?
Pinecone prices by usage, combined with flat-rate tiers. Buyers can sign up on their own or go through the sales team. Its plans are aimed mainly at developers.
Does Pinecone have a free plan?
Yes, Pinecone has a free plan, and its paid plans offer a free trial. Paid plans start at $20/mo flat.
Does Pinecone offer an annual discount?
Pinecone's pricing page shows a single billing period. The listed prices start at $20/mo flat. Terms for the plans priced through sales are set with the sales team.
How is Pinecone's pricing page laid out?
The page shows 4 plans, highlights Standard, and includes a comparison table. The breakdown above marks 14 points on it: 8 things it does well and 6 insights into the pricing.
How much do Pinecone read units and write units cost?
On the Standard plan, Write Units cost "$4-$4.50 per million" and Read Units cost "$16-$18 per million", with rates that vary by cloud and region. On Enterprise, writes are $6-$6.75 per million and reads are $24-$27 per million. The Starter plan includes "Up to 2M/mo" write units and "Up to 1M/mo" read units, and Builder raises those to "Up to 5M/mo" and "Up to 2M/mo" for its $20/month flat price.
Does Pinecone offer a free trial of the Standard plan?
Yes. The Standard plan's "Start Free Trial" button comes with a "3 week trial includes $300 credits" offer. After the trial, Standard carries a $50/month minimum usage, and anything over $50 is billed pay-as-you-go. Enterprise also offers a "Request Trial" option alongside its $500/month minimum.
How much is the Pinecone HIPAA add-on?
The comparison table lists HIPAA at $190/mo, available as a "HIPAA add-on" on the Standard plan. Enterprise includes "HIPAA Compliance" as part of the plan, along with a "99.95% Uptime SLA", Customer Managed Encryption Keys, Audit Logs and Pro support. The page points to the docs for full HIPAA details.
From the page as captured September 18, 2026. Current prices are on pinecone.io
Chroma
$250/mo + usageChroma prints all four metered rates in the hero, Write at $2.50 per GiB, Storage at $0.33 per GiB per month, Query at $0.0075 per TiB and Network at $0.09 per GiB returned, then hands the reader a calculator that turns documents and queries into a $79 monthly total. Plans sit on top of the meter: Starter at $0 plus usage, Team at $250 a month plus usage with $100 in credits, and Enterprise on custom terms.
Confluent
~$385/moConfluent prices serverless Kafka on a composite meter, eCKU-hours plus data in and out per GB plus storage per GB-month, and closes its rate table with an 'Estimated Monthly Starting Cost' of $0, $385, $895 and $2,300 that turns an hourly unit into a budget number. Behind it sit two discount structures and an annual commitment that can be spent across the whole Confluent Cloud stack.
Datadog
$15/host/moDatadog publishes a rate card per product, with every billable SKU listed in a left-hand navigator from AI Credits to Workflow Automation. Infrastructure Monitoring prices per host across three host levels: Basic, set with sales, beside Pro starting at $ 15 and Enterprise at $ 23 billed annually, with on-demand rates printed beside them and allotments of containers, custom metrics and custom events attached to each paid host. The bill is the sum of the products a customer adopts, and Basic hosts let one account price noncritical workloads at their own level.
Fly.io
From $0.0030/hr (shared-cpu-1x, 256MB)Fly.io prices raw infrastructure: Machines 'Billed by the second while a Machine runs', volumes on provisioned capacity, and egress by region, with prices set per region through a selector. Support is sold as its own ladder at '$29 / mo', '$199 / mo' and 'From $2,500 / mo', compliance is a '$99/mo' add-on, and a Custom plan covers committed spend and volume discounts.
Grafana
$19/moGrafana Cloud prices on a $19 per month platform fee that carries an allowance on every product, then a usage meter chosen per product, with volume tiers that lower the marginal rate as a customer grows. The hero states the thesis, 'Send more, charge more is broken. We are changing it.', and the page backs it with an embedded calculator that draws the tier curve and a cost-reduction band under the rates. Enterprise prints its entry point: 'Starts at $25,000 / year spend commit'.
Modal
$250 + compute/moModal bills GPU, CPU, memory and storage by the second or month, and network egress at '$0.04 / GiB', with the full rate card under the promise of paying for 'just actual compute time, by the CPU cycle'. Plans are a platform fee plus that usage: Starter at $0 with $30 of monthly credits and 1 TiB of egress, Team at $250 with $100 and 10 TiB, and a custom Enterprise with 100 TiB. A worked comparison makes the serverless case on utilization, with a $3.95 GPU-hour that totals '12% lower cost' than $3 GPU-hours provisioned around the clock.