by Pinecone Systems, Inc.
Pinecone review, pricing and verdict
Managed vector database for search, RAG and agent memory.
- Best for
- Backend engineer
- Not for
- Platform engineer who must self-host
Should you use Pinecone?
Pick Pinecone if you want retrieval running without operating a cluster and can accept a hosted, closed service. It replaces a self-run vector store for small teams. Skip it if you need read-after-write consistency or self-hosting. It lists 8 regions, and a free Starter plan covers prototypes.
A serverless managed vector index with hosted embedding, reranking and an Assistant service behind one API.
Teams that build on Pinecone's index format and hosted models face a re-embedding and migration job to leave, while open-source rivals and Postgres extensions weaken that lock-in.
Also for
- AI application developer
- Backend engineers adding RAG to a product
Show 2 more
- Small teams that want managed retrieval without running a cluster
- Enterprises needing SSO, audit logs and an uptime SLA
Main trade-off
Documented as eventually consistent, with flat metadata rules and monthly minimums on the paid production plans.
Pinecone pricing
Server plans
| Plan | Storage | Price |
|---|---|---|
| StarterCloud · Trying the product and small applications · US East (N. Virginia), AWS us-east-1 | 2 GB | $0/mo |
| BuilderCloud · Solo developers and small teams · All available regions | 10 GB | $20/mo |
| StandardCloud · Production applications at any scale · All available regions | — | $50/mo |
| EnterpriseCloud · Mission-critical production applications · All available regions | — | $500/mo |
- Minimum commitment
- None on Starter and Builder; monthly minimum usage on Standard and Enterprise
- Billing
- Pay as you go · Subscription · Monthly · Freemium
Starter is free. Builder is a flat $20 a month. Standard has a $50 monthly minimum and Enterprise a $500 monthly minimum, then pay as you go. Bring Your Own Cloud is quoted by sales.
Bandwidth pricing
Standard and Enterprise include 100 GB of egress a month, then $0.10 per GB. Cross-region restores add a per-GB transfer fee.
Costs that are easy to miss
- HIPAA support on Standard is a $190 a month add-on
- Egress beyond 100 GB a month on Standard and Enterprise costs $0.10 per GB
- Restoring a backup into another region adds a cross-region transfer fee
Pinecone regions and compliance
- Uptime SLA
- 99.95%
Available regions
- US East (N. Virginia), AWS us-east-1
- US West (Oregon), AWS us-west-2
- Europe (Ireland), AWS eu-west-1
- Europe (Frankfurt), AWS eu-central-1
- Asia Pacific (Singapore), AWS ap-southeast-1
- US Central (Iowa), GCP us-central1
- Europe (Netherlands), GCP europe-west4
- US East (Virginia), Azure eastus2
Compliance certifications
- SOC 2
- GDPR
- ISO 27001
- HIPAA
As stated by the provider. Ask for the current report before you rely on one.
Managed services
- Vector database (on-demand)
- Dedicated Read Nodes
- Bring Your Own Cloud
- Inference (embedding and reranking models)
- Assistant
- Backup and restore
Access methods
- Web console
- API
- Dashboard
Networking
- Private networksSupported
Storage services
- Backup and snapshotsSupported
What Pinecone does
Pinecone is a managed vector database sold as a serverless service on AWS, GCP and Azure. It stores embeddings and answers similarity queries for search and retrieval-augmented generation. Its differentiator is hosted embedding and reranking models on the same bill, and it publishes a 99.95% uptime SLA for Enterprise.
Serverless indexes
Indexes sit on distributed object storage, and Standard bills storage at $0.33 per GB a month plus read and write units.
Dense, sparse and full-text indexes
All four plans support dense, sparse and full-text index types, so one service covers semantic and keyword retrieval.
Hosted embedding and reranking
Pinecone Inference serves embedding and reranking models, with 5M embedding tokens a month included on Starter (10M through 31 December 2026).
Dedicated Read Nodes
Standard and Enterprise can reserve query infrastructure for an index, which Pinecone says removes noisy neighbours and read rate limits.
Show all 7 features
Bring Your Own Cloud
Pinecone runs inside your own cloud account and VPC, which Pinecone says needs no SSH, VPN or inbound access.
Postgres extension
pg_pinecone, released 27 October 2026, adds Pinecone search to an existing Postgres database without changing tables.
Enterprise access controls
RBAC and SAML SSO arrive on Standard, and Enterprise adds audit logs, SCIM, service accounts and customer managed keys.
Strengths and limits
Strengths
- The free Starter plan includes 2 GB of storage and 1M read units a month, enough to build and demo a RAG prototype at no cost.
- It runs on 3 clouds in 8 listed regions, including Singapore, Frankfurt and Ireland, so data can sit near the application.
- Enterprise carries a written 99.95% uptime SLA, stated on Pinecone's pricing and security pages (read 13 November 2026).
- Pinecone Inference lists embedding and reranking models as a usage line on the same plans, so the embedding step needs no second contract (pricing page, read 13 November 2026).
Limits
- Pinecone's known limitations page says the service is eventually consistent, so upserted records may not be queryable straight away.
- Metadata cannot hold nested JSON objects or empty-valued keys, per Pinecone's known limitations page, so richly structured documents need flattening.
- Starter is limited to AWS us-east-1, so a team that needs Europe or Asia must pay for Builder at minimum.
- Paid production plans carry fixed monthly floors of $50 (Standard) and $500 (Enterprise), a standing cost for a low-traffic app.
Pinecone facts
- Provider founded
- 2019
- Headquarters
- New York, USA
- Open source
- No
What changed
Questions about Pinecone
How much does Pinecone cost?
Starter is free, Builder is a flat $20 a month, and Standard and Enterprise have minimum monthly spends of $50 and $500 before pay as you go. On Standard, storage is $0.33 per GB a month, writes are $4 to $4.50 per million and reads are $16 to $18 per million, depending on cloud and region. Enterprise raises writes to $6 to $6.75 and reads to $24 to $27 per million, and egress is $0.10 per GB after 100 GB a month.
Does Pinecone have a free plan?
Yes. The Starter plan is free and includes up to 2 GB of storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, and up to 5 indexes. It runs only in AWS us-east-1 and has community support on Discord. Standard also offers a 3 week trial that includes $300 in credits.
Which clouds and regions does Pinecone run in?
Its pricing page lists 8 regions: AWS us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, eu-central-1 and ap-southeast-1, GCP us-central1 and europe-west4, and Azure eastus2. Starter is limited to AWS us-east-1. Builder and above can pick any available cloud and region.
Can I query records immediately after an upsert?
Not always. Pinecone's known limitations page states the service is eventually consistent, so there can be a slight delay before upserted records are available to query. It suggests checking index stats to see whether the vector count matches what you expect before querying.
Is Pinecone certified for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA?
Pinecone's security page shows SOC 2, GDPR and ISO 27001 badges and lets customers request a HIPAA business associate agreement. HIPAA is a paid add-on on Standard and included on Enterprise. Enterprise also adds audit logs, private endpoints and customer managed encryption keys.
About Pinecone
Pinecone is a fully managed vector database. You send it embeddings, it stores and indexes them, and your application queries by similarity for semantic search, recommendations and retrieval-augmented generation. Pinecone Systems was founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty, a former research director at AWS and Yahoo, and is headquartered in New York. The company says more than 10,000 customers and 1 million developers use it.
Read the full background
The product is serverless: indexes sit on object storage and you are billed on storage, read units and write units rather than on servers you size. Beyond the core database, Pinecone sells hosted embedding and reranking models, an Assistant service for chat and agent apps, Dedicated Read Nodes for steady query load, and Bring Your Own Cloud, which runs Pinecone inside your own cloud account. It also released pg_pinecone in October 2026, an open-source Postgres extension that brings its search into a database you already run. It plugs into frameworks such as LlamaIndex and LangChain, and its hosted model catalogue includes models from OpenAI and Cohere.
It fits product teams that want retrieval running without operating a cluster: a small team shipping a RAG feature, or a company that needs a managed index with role-based access, SSO and backups. It runs on AWS, GCP and Azure, the clouds of Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. The full list of peers is in the vector database directory, and the guide to AI search and retrieval infrastructure weighs it against them.
Choose Pinecone if a hosted, closed service suits you and you want retrieval running without a cluster to operate. Choose an open-source rival you can run yourself, such as Weaviate, Qdrant or Chroma, if you need to self-host, and choose an embedded option such as LanceDB if you want the database inside your app. Pinecone's own comparison pages name pgvector, Elasticsearch and Vertex AI Vector Search as the alternatives it expects buyers to weigh. If you need hard read-after-write consistency, read the known limitations first, because Pinecone documents its index as eventually consistent.
Sources and guides
Official sources
- Pinecone official site Vendor
- GitHub repository GitHub
Plans, regions, the uptime commitment and the compliance list on this page are read from Pinecone Systems, Inc.'s own pages and documentation. The verdict is Hokai's reading of them, not the provider's claim.
Lists that include Pinecone
More AI Infrastructure Services on Hokai
AgentMailEmail inbox API built so every AI agent can own, read and answer its own inbox
Amazon SESAWS email sending and receiving, metered per thousand messagesCloudflare Email ServiceSend and receive email from Workers and agents, with unlimited inbound routing
PostmarkTransactional email API that keeps app mail apart from bulk sendsResendEmail API for developers, with inboxes your AI agents can read and answer
SendGridTwilio email API and SMTP relay for high-volume transactional and marketing mail