Yes, Pinecone has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes up to 2 GB storage, up to 2 million write units per month, and up to 1 million read units per month. FreeTier.co estimates the free tier at about $10/mo.
About
Pinecone is a fully managed vector database platform built to help teams develop knowledgeable AI applications at production scale. It provides fast similarity search, hybrid retrieval, namespaces for data partitioning, and real-time indexing for dynamic datasets.
The platform is designed for developers and enterprises that need reliable retrieval for use cases such as semantic search, recommendations, agents, and retrieval-augmented generation. Pinecone also offers hosted inference, reranking, and assistant capabilities, along with integrations across cloud providers, models, and frameworks.
- Purpose-built vector database for production AI workloads
- Serverless architecture with automatic scaling
- Advanced retrieval features including filters, rerankers, and namespaces
- Enterprise security, compliance, and operational controls
- Support for search, recommendations, agents, and RAG workflows
Free Tier Value
This free tier is a capped starter offering, not an uncapped forever plan, and the page does not say a credit card is unnecessary. Compared with the $20/month Builder plan, it includes the core product surface and support but with tight limits on storage, units, projects, and users, so it feels like roughly half of Builder’s value - about $10/month.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Free Starter plan for trying out and small applications.
- Access to Pinecone Database On-Demand.
- Access to Pinecone Inference.
- Access to Pinecone Assistant.
- Console Metrics included.
- Community support via Discord included.
- Up to 2 GB storage.
- Up to 2 million write units per month.
- Up to 1 million read units per month.
- Up to 5 indexes.
- Up to 100 namespaces per index.
- Access to all available embedding models.
- Access to all reranking models except cohere-rerank-3.5.
- Up to 1 project.
- Up to 2 users.
- Access to encryption at rest and in transit.
- Access to user RBAC.
- Access to API key RBAC.
- Access to SOC 2 compliance.
- Access to GDPR compliance.
- Access to ISO 27001 compliance.
- United States region only.
- AWS cloud only.
See Pinecone pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Builder
- indexes per project
- 10
- namespaces per index
- 1,000
- storage
- 10 GB
- write units
- 5M/mo
- read units
- 2M/mo
- assistant input tokens
- 2M/mo
- Everything in Starter
- Increased usage limits
- Choose your cloud and region
- Multiple projects and users
- Prometheus and Datadog monitoring
- Free support included
- Response SLAs available as add-ons
Standard
- monthly minimum
- $50
- trial credits
- $300 for 3 weeks
- storage
- Unlimited
- write units
- Unlimited
- read units
- Unlimited
- assistant storage
- Unlimited
- Everything in Builder
- Pay-as-you-go for Database On-Demand, Inference, and Assistant usage
- Choose your cloud and region
- Dedicated Read Nodes
- Import from object storage
- Backup and Restore
- RBAC
- SSO (SAML 2.0)
Enterprise
- monthly minimum
- $500
- storage
- Unlimited
- write units
- Unlimited
- read units
- Unlimited
- assistant storage
- Unlimited
- projects
- 100
- Everything in Standard
- 99.95% uptime SLA
- Bring Your Own Cloud
- Private Endpoints
- Customer Managed Encryption Keys
- Audit Logs
- Service Accounts
- SAML roles
Pricing extracted from Pinecone's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Pinecone free forever?
Yes. Pinecone has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
What happens when you exceed Pinecone's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Pinecone's cheapest paid plan is Builder at $20 / month.
What is Pinecone's free tier worth?
Pinecone's free tier is worth about $10 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 49/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
