This page provides guidance on managing the cost of Pinecone. For the latest pricing details, see our pricing page. For help estimating total cost, see Understanding cost. To view or download a detailed report of your current usage and costs, see Monitor usage and costs.

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Set a monthly spend alert

To receive an email notification when your organization’s spending reaches a specified limit, set a monthly spend alert:
  1. Go to Settings > Usage in the Pinecone console.
  2. In the Monthly spend alert section, click Create spend alert.
  3. Enter the dollar amount at which you want to receive an alert.
  4. Click Update alert.

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Choose the right index

  • Serverless: With serverless indexes, you don’t configure or manage any compute or storage resources. Instead, based on a breakthrough architecture, serverless indexes scale automatically based on usage, and you pay only for the amount of data stored and operations performed, with no minimums. This means that there’s no extra cost for having additional indexes.
  • Pod-based: Pod sizes are designed for different applications, and some are more expensive than others. Choose the appropriate pod type and size, so you pay for the resources you need. For example, the s1 pod type provides large storage capacity and lower overall costs with slightly higher query latencies than p1 pods. By switching to a different pod type, you may be able to reduce costs while still getting the performance your application needs.
    For pod-based indexes, project owners can set limits for the total number of pods across all indexes in the project. The default pod limit is 5.

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List by ID prefix

list is not supported for pod-based indexes.
By using a hierarchical ID schema, you can retrieve records without performing a query. To do so, you can use list to retrieve records by ID prefix, then use fetch to retrieve the records you need. This can reduce costs, because query consumes more RUs when scanning a larger namespace, while fetch consumes a fixed ratio of RUs to records retrieved.

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Back up inactive pod-based indexes

For each pod-based index, billing is determined by the per-minute price per pod and the number of pods the index uses, regardless of index activity. When a pod-based index is not in use, back it up using collections and delete the inactive index. When you’re ready to use the vectors again, you can create a new index from the collection. This new index can also use a different index type or size. Because it’s relatively cheap to store collections, you can reduce costs by only running an index when it’s in use.

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Use namespaces for multitenancy

If your application requires you to isolate the data of each customer/user, consider implementing multitenancy with serverless indexes and namespaces. With serverless indexes, you pay only for the amount of data stored and operations performed. For queries in particular, the cost is partly based on the total number of records that must be scanned, so using namespaces can significantly reduce query costs.

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Commit to annual spend

Users who commit to an annual contract may qualify for discounted rates. To learn more, contact Pinecone sales.

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Talk to support

Users on the Standard and Enterprise plans can contact Support for help in optimizing costs.

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See also