Pinecone

Pinecone is a managed vector database platform built for teams running retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, semantic search, and other workloads that rely on similarity search over embeddings at scale. It's aimed at engineering teams working on AI/ML infrastructure who want a hosted alternative to running their own vector search systems — from startups prototyping their first RAG app to larger organizations with production-scale uptime and compliance needs.

Pricing

Pinecone offers five tiers, from a $0/month Starter plan up to a Custom-priced Bring Your Own Cloud option, with $20/month (Builder), $50/month minimum (Standard), and $500/month minimum (Enterprise) in between. Storage, write/read units, and Pinecone Assistant/Inference usage are all metered on top of each tier's base — the full per-resource rate breakdown is in this profile's pricing card.

API and Access

Pinecone exposes an API, so it's built to function as core infrastructure — something you wire directly into application backends, data pipelines, and AI orchestration frameworks — rather than a tool meant to be operated only through a UI.

SOC 2 Status

SOC 2 certification status is not publicly disclosed.

Features

Pinecone's feature set spans indexing, deployment, and the operational mechanics of running vector data in production:

• Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes — multiple index types for different retrieval strategies, including hybrid dense/sparse search and full-text search.
• Pinecone Database On-Demand — the core managed vector database for storing and querying embeddings.
• Pinecone Inference — built-in embedding and reranking models, billed at the token/request rates listed above.
• Pinecone Assistant — a higher-level RAG-oriented service with its own storage tier and token-based billing across input, output, context, and evaluation processing.
• Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN) — an infrastructure option for isolating and scaling read-query capacity independently.
• Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) — a deployment option that runs the database inside a customer's own cloud environment.
• Import from object storage — bulk data loading directly from object storage, billed at $0.25/GB.
• Backup and Restore — data protection with backups billed at $0.10/GB/month and restores at $0.15/GB.
• RBAC — role-based access control for managing permissions across users and teams.
• SSO (SAML 2.0) — single sign-on for enterprise identity integration.
• 99.95% Uptime SLA — a formal availability commitment.

Between the consumption-based pricing and this feature list, Pinecone reads as a platform built for technical teams that want fine-grained control over their vector infrastructure — where the database runs (BYOC), who can touch it (RBAC, SSO), and how it recovers from failure (backup/restore) — while paying for what they actually use rather than committing to a fixed subscription tier.