Pinecone free tier includes Vector database… Catalogue date July 2026. Compare with 6 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 6 alternatives. Catalogue date July 2026. Last updated 2026-09-26.

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 All 2 records we hold were our own errors and have been withdrawn.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 — 6 alternatives available.

One of 83 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →
Tier
Free
Category
Pricing Page
Catalogue date
2026-07-31
Last read
2026-09-26
The day we last read the vendor's page. Our last read of it, on 2026-09-26, found the page different from the terms we hold. We hold no confirmation of the terms we publish — the 2026-07-31 beside this date is not one we can source to a read that confirmed them.

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 2026-09-26 from https://pinecone.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Pinecone as "pinecone" and states "1GB/mo". A source check reads the cited page for the service's name and a price; the limits above are from our own record.

When You'll Outgrow Pinecone's Free Tier

Pricing Change History (2 recorded)

Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-26). The Starter plan is still available as a free tier. The limits have been updated. 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 ↗
Before: Vector database — The Starter plan is free and includes up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units/month, 1M read units/month, 5 indexes, 1GB Assistant storage, 500k input tokens, 300k output tokens, and 500k context processed tokens. It also includes access to various embedding and reranking models with token/request limits.
After: The Starter plan is free and includes up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units/month, 1M read units/month, 1GB Assistant storage, 500k input tokens, 300k output tokens, and 500k context processed tokens. It also includes access to various embedding and reranking models with token/request limits.
Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-27). The Starter plan is still available as a free tier. The details have been expanded. The page now lists specific example workloads and their estimated usage within the Starter plan. It also details pricing for exceeding the free tier limits for various components like storage, write units, read units, egress, and assistant features. 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 ↗
Before: Vector database — 2 GB storage, 2M write units/month, 1M read units/month, 5 indexes, 5M embedding tokens/month. Pinecone Assistant: 100 docs / 1 GB
After: The Starter plan is free and includes up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units/month, 1M read units/month, 5 indexes, 1GB Assistant storage, 500k input tokens, 300k output tokens, and 500k context processed tokens. It also includes access to various embedding and reranking models with token/request limits.

View all 476 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Pinecone compares against every one of the 6 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
Cohere Free stable
Qdrant Free stable
Google Gemini API Free (Reduced) stable
Google Gemini Embedding 2 Pay-as-you-go unrated
Google Vector Search 2.0 Pay-as-you-go source unconfirmed
Together AI Pay-as-you-go 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), 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), 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), 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 (we have not classified this record), Zep (we have not classified this record), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (we have not classified this record), Cognee (we have not classified this record), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (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 6 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
2026-09-30
query_key
alternatives:AI / ML:Pinecone
seed
bccc619c0380a4552c5c870de974d7b0807c0f3c2246756f309ce08c060dbce0
tie_count
3

Alternatives Guides Featuring Pinecone

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 →

Query via MCP

Look up Pinecone programmatically with the AgentDeals MCP server:

{ "tool": "search_deals", "arguments": { "query": "Pinecone", "limit": 5 } }

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 6 free alternatives to Pinecone in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 3 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 3 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 6 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.

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