Pinecone
Serverless vector database with pay-per-use pricing
Overview
Pinecone is a fully managed, serverless vector database for similarity search, RAG and recommendations — auto-scaling storage and query capacity so teams skip running their own vector infrastructure. It now also sells Nexus, a knowledge engine for AI agents, and bring-your-own-cloud deployments.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 30 Sep 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Up to 5 serverless indexes
- AWS us-east-1 only
- No SLA
- Flat monthly price, no usage minimum
- Writes $4–$4.50 and reads $16–$18 per million
- Storage $0.33/GB/month
- RBAC and SSO (SAML 2.0)
- Regions incl. AWS Singapore
- Uptime SLA
- Audit logging
- Dedicated support
- Runs in the customer's cloud account
- Contact for pricing
Use cases
What you can produce with Pinecone
- Serverless auto-scaling vector indexes
- Low-latency similarity search without hand-tuning an ANN index
- Multi-cloud serverless deployment on AWS, Azure and GCP, including AWS Singapore on paid plans
- Python, TypeScript, Java and Go SDKs
- Metadata filtering, hybrid (sparse+dense) search and full-text search
- Namespaces for multi-tenant isolation
- Nexus, a knowledge engine for AI agents (GA August 2026)
- Integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and major embedding providers
Pinecone remains the reference point for managed vector databases: serverless architecture that auto-scales without index-sizing decisions, low-latency queries, and SDKs across Python, TypeScript, Java and Go that make it one of the fastest ways to stand up production retrieval. It raised a $100M Series B at a $750M valuation and says it serves more than 10,000 customers, Gong among them — real production scale, not a demo product, though Pinecone publishes no revenue. The complaints cluster around cost and lock-in. The Standard plan's $50/month minimum pushed hobbyists toward self-hosted alternatives like Chroma or pgvector, though a $20 flat Builder plan now sits below it. Paid plans can host serverless indexes in Singapore, which helps ASEAN teams with data locality; only the free tier is limited to us-east-1. Leadership has changed — a new CEO since September 2025 and the founder stepping back in 2026 — as the company broadens into agent knowledge tools. It's the safest default for teams that want managed reliability over ops burden.
What we found
Pinecone's G2 page shows 4.5 out of 5 from 75 reviews, and the pattern there and on AWS Marketplace is consistent: users like how quickly they can stand up an index without running infrastructure, and the low-latency similarity search that removes the need to hand-tune an ANN index yourself.
The recurring criticism is pricing, and it sharpened when Pinecone put a $50-a-month minimum on its Standard plan, on top of usage-based rates for writes, reads and storage. A Reddit thread titled roughly "Pinecone's new $50/mo minimum just nuked my hobby project" captured the reaction from smaller users, several of whom moved to self-hosted options such as Chroma or pgvector. Pinecone has since added a $20-a-month flat Builder plan between the free Starter tier and Standard, which softens that cliff, while Enterprise carries a $500 monthly minimum.
An older complaint about regions no longer holds for paying customers. Only the free Starter plan is confined to AWS us-east-1; paid plans can run serverless indexes in several AWS regions, including Singapore, as well as on Google Cloud and Azure. There is still no India region, which one reviewer had asked for.
On the business side, Pinecone raised a $100 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $750 million valuation and has announced no round since. It was reported in 2025 to be exploring a sale, and lost Notion as a customer; Ash Ashutosh became chief executive that September, and founder Edo Liberty stepped back from day-to-day work in August 2026. Pinecone now says it serves more than 10,000 customers and has broadened into what it calls a knowledge company, with Nexus, a knowledge engine for AI agents, generally available since August 2026, followed by full-text search and bring-your-own-cloud deployment in September.
Bottom line: reliable, fast and easy to integrate, and still the default many teams reach for first — but budget past the free tier carefully.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Pinecone's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Pinecone unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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