Pinecone free tier includes Vector database… Verified November 2026. Compare with 7 alternatives in AI / ML.

Pinecone Free Tier 2026

stable

Subtypes in AI / ML: vector_store — stores embeddings and answers nearest-neighbour queries as its primary access path; embeddings_api — returns a vector for text or media so it can be compared to other vectors; the vector is the output, not a completion. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.pinecone.io/, where it says: “Pinecone is a fully managed vector database built for AI. Writes are instantly searchable, indexing is automatic, and queries stay fast at any scale.” and from https://pinecone.io/pricing, where it says: “Inference - Embedding llama-text-embed-v2 5M tokens/mo included” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 7 alternatives. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-11.

Pinecone's free tier offers Vector database… We rate it stable. All 2 records we hold were our own errors and have been withdrawn. Best for ai / ml workloads — 7 alternatives available.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free

Free Tier Details

Vector database. The Starter plan is free: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, 1 GB of egress a month (reads that return data stop at the cap until the next billing period), 5 indexes, 1 project and 2 users, on AWS us-east-1 only. Assistant includes 1 GB storage and 500k input, 300k output and 500k context tokens a month. Three embedding models include 5M tokens a month each; bge-reranker-v2-m3 includes 500 requests a month. Builder is $20/month flat.

We read that on 2026-11-11 from https://pinecone.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Pinecone as "pinecone" and states "$20" and "1GB/mo" and "5M tokens/mo" and "500 requests/mo".

When You'll Outgrow Pinecone's Free Tier

At 2 GB storage, you'll need to upgrade.
At 500 requests/mo, you'll need to upgrade.
At 1 project, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 7 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (2 recorded)

increased discovered 2026-09-26 · effective date unknown medium impact

Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-26). Retracted 2026-09-26: Pinecone's limits did not change. The pricing page, read 2026-09-26, still lists the Starter plan with "Indexes Up to 5"; the reading left the index limit out and the record called the difference an increase. Source ↗

restructured discovered 2026-09-10 · effective date unknown medium impact

Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-27). Retracted 2026-09-27: nothing changed on 2026-09-10. The Internet Archive's captures of Pinecone's pricing page on 2026-09-02 and 2026-09-12 list the same Starter plan: up to 2 GB of storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, up to 5 indexes, and 1 GB of Assistant storage with 500k input and 300k output tokens a month. The record compared the page with our own listing text. Source ↗

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Pinecone compares against every one of the 7 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service	Free Tier	Stability
Pinecone	Free	stable
Google Gemini Embedding 2	Free Free of charge text, image, audio, and video input on the Gemini API free tier, with Google using the content to improve its products. Batch is not available on the free tier.	stable
Google Gemini API	Free (Reduced) Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe…	stable
Cohere	Free AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month.	stable
Qdrant	Free Vector database. The Qdrant Cloud Free Tier is a single-node cluster with 0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM and 4 GB disk, for testing and prototypes, with no credit card required; Qdrant says it serves about 1M vectors of 768 dimensions.	stable
Jina AI	Free Credits Search, Reader, embeddings and reranker APIs. Each new API key comes with 10M free tokens, shared across these APIs; no page says they renew.	stable
Google Vector Search 2.0	Pay-as-you-go Google Vector Search 2.0 is now Agent Retrieval. It is part of the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, formerly Vertex AI Platform.	unrated
Together AI	Pay-as-you-go Inference API for open-source models, billed per token. Together AI does not currently offer free trials; access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for an organization's first purchase ($5 for later purchases), and the platform is fully prepaid.	unrated

Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 7 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.

date: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:Pinecone
seed: 9550766f5b3c913a4c7647755d453bcedc12f93fc5a8186a85feca5fdceb55cb
tie_count: 4

Alternatives Guides Featuring Pinecone

Vector Database Pricing Comparison 2026

Watch Pinecone for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=Pinecone
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Pinecone

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Pinecone free?

Yes, Pinecone offers a free tier: Free. Vector database. The Starter plan is free: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, 1 GB of egress a month (reads that return data stop at the cap until the next billing period), ...

What is Pinecone's free tier?

Pinecone's free tier is called "Free". Vector database. The Starter plan is free: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units a month, 1 GB of egress a month (reads that return data stop at the cap until the next billing period), 5 indexes, 1 project and 2 users, on AWS us-east-1 only. Assistant includes 1 GB storage and 500k input, 300k output and 500k context tokens a month. Three embedding models include 5M tokens a month each; bge-reranker-v2-m3 includes 500 requests a month. Builder is $20/month flat.

Is Pinecone's free tier reliable?

Pinecone's free tier is considered stable. All 2 records we hold were our own errors and have been withdrawn. See the pricing history below.

Is Pinecone's free tier good for production?

Pinecone's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers Vector database…, so it's a reasonable starting point. All 2 records we hold were our own errors and have been withdrawn. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.

What changed in Pinecone's pricing?

All 2 records we hold were our own errors and have been withdrawn.

What are the best free alternatives to Pinecone?

We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 7 free alternatives to Pinecone in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 4 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 1 is demoted with the reason named, 2 are listed last behind a stated gate. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

When will I outgrow Pinecone's free tier?

At 2 GB storage, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.

What category is Pinecone in?

Pinecone is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 7 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.