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To change your billing plan, you must be an organization owner or billing admin.
If you are on the Standard plan with credit/debit card billing and want to reduce spend without returning to the free Starter plan, consider switching to the Builder plan for a flat $20/month.

Before you downgrade

When you downgrade to the Starter plan in the Pinecone console, you choose which projects, indexes, assistants, and members to keep, up to the Starter plan limits: 1 project, 5 serverless indexes in the us-east-1 region of AWS, 5 assistants, and 2 members. Pinecone deletes everything you don’t keep, along with all backups, backup schedules, and collections. The downgrade doesn’t reduce your data or change your configuration, so do this first:
  • Move any serverless indexes outside the us-east-1 region of AWS that you want to keep. Create a new index in us-east-1, re-upsert your data, and delete the old index before you start the downgrade. Indexes in other regions can’t be kept on Starter.
  • Migrate any dedicated read node indexes whose data you want to keep. They can’t run on Starter and there’s no self-serve conversion. If the index is in us-east-1, back it up and restore it (this creates a new on-demand serverless index in the same region), then delete the original and keep the restored index during the downgrade. If it’s in another region, create a new us-east-1 index and re-upsert your data as described above. You can also contact Support to migrate back.
  • Migrate any pod-based indexes whose data you want to keep. Migrate each one to serverless and finish creating the new serverless index before you start the downgrade: the migration saves your index as a collection, and the downgrade deletes all collections.
  • Move any eu-region assistants you want to keep to us. Recreate them in us and re-upload their files. eu assistants you don’t move are deleted.
  • Disconnect your organization’s SSO connection.
  • Reassign or remove members whose organization role isn’t available on the Starter plan.
  • Get under the Starter storage limits. Do this last, after the migrations above, which can briefly leave a second copy of an index: no more than 2 GB of data across your serverless indexes and 1 GB of assistant storage. Delete records and assistant files to fit.
You don’t need to bring Assistant usage (ingestion units, chat tokens, and context tokens) under Starter caps before downgrading. If you exceed Starter limits after downgrading, new requests may be blocked until usage is within limits.
Switching from Standard to Builder instead of Starter? Your organization must be under the Builder plan quotas, backups must be deleted, and any features not available on Builder, such as bulk import, pod-based indexes, storage integrations, RBAC, and SSO, must be removed or stopped.

Downgrade to the Starter plan

The downgrade process is different depending on how you are paying for Pinecone.
Start the downgrade in the Pinecone console, as described below. The console walks you through what to keep and cleans up the rest. If you start the downgrade in a cloud marketplace instead, that cleanup doesn’t run, so Pinecone deactivates your account and you’ll need to contact Support.
If you are paying with a credit card, downgrade as follows:
  1. In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
  2. Click Downgrade in the Starter plan section.
Your billing will end immediately. However, you will receive a final invoice for any charges accrued in the current month.

Switch from Standard to Builder

If you are on the Standard plan with credit/debit card billing and would like to switch to the Builder plan (flat $20/month), do the following:
  1. Bring your organization under the Builder plan quotas. In particular, you must be within the Builder plan limits for projects, indexes, namespaces, storage, users, and monthly usage units.
  2. In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
  3. Click Switch to Builder in the Builder plan section.
  4. Confirm the change.
After switching, overages are no longer billed—requests that exceed Builder quotas are blocked instead. If you need more capacity, upgrade back to Standard or Enterprise at any time.
The Builder plan is available with credit/debit card billing only and is not supported through cloud marketplaces.
If you pay through a cloud marketplace, you cannot switch to the Builder plan at this time. Contact Support to be notified when this migration becomes available.