Understanding cost

Overview

This topic describes the calculation of total cost for Pinecone, including an example. All prices are examples; for the latest pricing details, please see our pricing page. While our pricing page lists rates on an hourly basis for ease of comparison, this topic lists prices per minute, as this is how Pinecone calculates billing.

How does Pinecone calculate costs?

For each index, billing is determined by the per-minute price per pod and the number of pods the index uses, regardless of index activity. The per-minute price varies by pod type, pod size, account plan, and cloud region.

Total cost depends on a combination of factors:

Pod type. Each pod type has different per-minute pricing.
Number of pods. This includes replicas, which duplicate pods.
Pod size. Larger pod sizes have proportionally higher costs per minute.
Total pod-minutes. This includes the total time each pod is running, starting at pod creation and rounded up to 15-minute increments.
Cloud provider. The cost per pod-type and pod-minute varies depending on the cloud provider you choose for your project.
Collection storage. Collections incur costs per GB of data per minute in storage, rounded up to 15-minute increments.
Plan. The free plan incurs no costs; the Standard or Enterprise plans incur different costs per pod-type, pod-minute, cloud provider, and collection storage.

The following equation calculates the total costs accrued over time:

(Number of pods) * (pod size) * (number of replicas) * (minutes pod exists) * (pod price per minute)

(collection storage in GB) * (collection storage time in minutes) * (collection storage price per GB per minute)

To see a calculation of your current usage and costs, see the usage dashboard in the Pinecone console.

Example total cost calculation

An example application has the following requirements:

1,000,000 vectors with 1536 dimensions
150 queries per second with top_k = 10
Deployment in an EU region
Ability to store 1GB of inactive vectors

Based on these requirements, the organization chooses to configure the project to use the Standard billing plan to host one p1.x2 pod with two replicas and a collection containing 1 GB of data. This project runs continuously for the month of January on the Standard plan. The components of the total cost for this example are given in Table 1 below:

Table 1: Example billing components

Billing component	Value
Number of pods	1
Number of replicas	3
Pod size	x2
Total pod count	6
Minutes in January	44,640
Pod-minutes (pods * minutes)	267,840
Pod price per minute	$0.0012
Collection storage	1 GB
Collection storage minutes	44,640
Price per storage minute	$0.00000056

The invoice for this example is given in Table 2 below:

Table 2: Example invoice

Product	Quantity	Price per unit	Charge
Collections	44,640	$0.00000056	$0.025
P2 Pods (AWS)	0		$0.00
P2 Pods (GCP)	0		$0.00
S1 Pods	0		$0.00
P1 Pods	267,840	$0.0012	$514.29

Amount due $514.54

Cost controls

Pinecone offers tools to help you understand and control your costs.

Monitoring usage. Using the usage dashboard in the Pinecone console, you can monitor your Pinecone usage and costs as these accrue.
Pod limits. Pinecone project owners can set limits for the total number of pods across all indexes in the project. The default pod limit is 5.

Next steps

Learn about choosing index type and size
Learn about monitoring usage