Pinecone

Pinecone is a fully managed, serverless vector database for storing and querying high-dimensional embeddings at scale. Serverless is the default for every new index: instead of provisioning and paying for idle compute pods, billing is based on read units, write units, and storage actually consumed, letting a project store billions of vectors without any server management. It supports dense, sparse, and full-text indexes side by side, with namespaces for multi-tenant isolation.

Beyond raw vector storage, Pinecone bundles Pinecone Inference, hosted embedding and reranking models built into the query pipeline so a separate embedding provider is not required, and Pinecone Assistant, a higher-level toolkit for building chat and RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) applications on top of an index. Dedicated Read Nodes serve read-heavy production workloads, and a Bring Your Own Cloud option runs the data plane inside a customer's own cloud account for data-residency requirements.

Pricing has four tiers. The free Starter tier is usable for real prototypes, with a few gigabytes of storage, several indexes, and Inference and Assistant allowances included. Builder is a flat monthly plan for solo developers and small teams, Standard adds pay-as-you-go usage above a monthly minimum with all cloud regions, SSO, and RBAC, and Enterprise adds an uptime SLA, private endpoints, customer-managed keys, and audit logs. Pinecone is closed source with no self-hosted deployment, unlike open-source vector database alternatives.