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Pinecone

Embeddings 5.1/10 Jun 17, 2026

Fully managed serverless vector database for similarity search and RAG, with built-in embedding and reranking inference.

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Pinecone scores 5.1/10 for free value in Embeddings. The main constraint: The Starter plan is free with no credit card: up to 2 GB storage, 2M write units/mo, 1M read units/mo, and up to 5 serverless indexes on AWS us-east-1, plus 5M embedding tokens/mo of Inference and 1 GB of Assistant storage.

Category Embeddings Kind Managed vector database Caveats Starter is locked to AWS us-east-1 and a single project (max 2 users); usage beyond the included limits is blocked rather than billed, so production scaling requires the paid Builder ($20/mo) or Standard ($50/mo min) plans. Reranking is restricted to the bge-reranker-v2-m3 model only. Renewal monthly Card required No Eligibility anyone

Free value score

5.1 / 10
Show the math
Overall 5.1/10
value = 5.1/100
weighted_components_v1
Free value 2.7/10
value = 0.7 $/mo
fixed_log_v1
Search fit 7/10
value = 7/100
policy_score_v1
Access 8.3/10
value = 8.3/100
policy_score_v1

Key metrics

5M tokens/mo Monthly tokens
1 tokens/min Tokens/min policy_default: Conservative scoring fallback: no comparable token throughput allowance is published in this item.
2 GB Storage

What you get

Genuinely free with no credit card required — usage is capped/blocked, not charged

Up to 5 serverless indexes with 2 GB storage, 2M write units and 1M read units per month

Includes 5M embedding tokens/mo of built-in Inference (no separate embedding provider needed)

Bundled Assistant with 1 GB storage and monthly token allowances for RAG apps

Gotchas

  • 2 GB storage cap

    Database storage is capped at up to 2 GB on the Starter plan.

  • 2M write units/month

    Up to 2M write units per month; resets monthly and additional usage is blocked, not billed.

  • 1M read units/month

    Up to 1M read units per month; resets monthly and additional usage is blocked, not billed.

  • Max 5 indexes

    Up to 5 serverless indexes, each limited to 100 namespaces.

  • AWS us-east-1 only

    Starter indexes can only be created on AWS in the us-east-1 region; choosing cloud/region requires a paid plan.

  • 1 project, max 2 users

    Starter is limited to a single project and up to 2 users.

  • 5M embedding tokens/month (Inference)

    Built-in Inference includes 5M tokens/mo per embedding model (llama-text-embed-v2, multilingual-e5-large, pinecone-sparse-english-v0); resets monthly.

  • Reranking limited to one model

    Inference reranking on Starter is restricted to bge-reranker-v2-m3 only, with 500 requests/mo included.

  • Assistant 1 GB + token allowances

    Assistant includes 1 GB storage, 500k input tokens/mo (promo: 1M/mo until June 30, 2026), 300k output tokens/mo, 500k context-processed tokens/mo, and 1,000 ingestion units/mo (USA region only).

  • Community support only

    Starter plan support is community-based via Discord; paid plans add free/pro support with SLAs.

  • No backups, RBAC, SSO, or monitoring

    Backup/restore, import from object storage, dedicated read nodes, user/API-key RBAC, SAML SSO, and Prometheus/Datadog monitoring are not available on Starter.

Sources

vector-database rag semantic-search embeddings serverless ai similarity-search managed
Open service Source ← All Embeddings

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