Understanding cost

This page describes how costs are incurred in Pinecone. For the latest pricing details, see Pricing.

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Minimum usage

The Standard and Enterprise pricing plans include a monthly minimum usage committment:

Plan	Minimum usage
Starter	$0/month
Standard	$50/month
Enterprise	$500/month

Beyond the monthly minimum, customers are charged for what they use each month. Examples

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Serverless indexes

With serverless indexes, you pay for the amount of data stored and operations performed, based on three usage metrics: read units, write units, and storage. For the latest serverless pricing rates, see Pricing.

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Read units

Read units (RUs) measure the compute, I/O, and network resources consumed by the following read requests:

• Query
• Fetch
• List

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Query

The cost of a query scales linearly with the size of the targeted namespace. Specifically, a query uses 1 RU for every 1 GB of namespace size, with a minimum of 0.25 RUs per query. For example, the following table contains the RU cost of searching indexes at different namespace sizes:

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Fetch

A fetch request uses 1 RU for every 10 records fetched, for example:

Fetched records	RUs
10	1
50	5
107	11

Specifying a non-existent ID or adding the same ID more than once does not increase the number of RUs used. However, a fetch request will always use at least 1 RU.

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List

List has a fixed cost of 1 RU per call, with up to 100 records per call.

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Write units

Write units (WUs) measure the storage and compute resources used by the following write requests:

• Upsert
• Update
• Delete

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Upsert

An upsert request uses 1 WU for each 1 KB of the request, with a minimum of 5 WUs per request. When an upsert modifies an existing record, the request uses 1 WU for each 1 KB of the existing record as well. For example, the following table shows the WUs used by upsert requests at different batch sizes and record sizes, assuming all records are new:

Records per batch	Dimension	Avg. metadata size	Avg. record size	WUs
1	768	100 bytes	3.2 KB	5
2	768	100 bytes	3.2 KB	7
10	1024	15,000 bytes	19.10 KB	191
100	768	500 bytes	3.57 KB	357
1000	1536	1000 bytes	7.14 KB	7140

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Update

An update request uses 1 WU for each 1 KB of the new and existing record, with a minimum of 5 WUs per request. For example, the following table shows the WUs used by an update at different record sizes:

New record size	Previous record size	WUs
6.24 KB	6.50 KB	13
19.10 KB	15 KB	25
3.57 KB	5 KB	9
7.14 KB	10 KB	18
3.17 KB	3.17 KB	7

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Delete

A delete request uses 1 WU for each 1 KB of the records deleted, with a minimum of 5 WUs per request. For example, the following table shows the WUs used by delete requests at different batch sizes and record sizes:

Records per batch	Dimension	Avg. metadata size	Avg. record size	WUs
1	768	100 bytes	3.2 KB	5
2	768	100 bytes	3.2 KB	7
10	1024	15,000 bytes	19.10 KB	191
100	768	500 bytes	3.57 KB	357
1000	1536	1000 bytes	7.14 KB	7140

Specifying a non-existent ID or adding the same ID more than once does not increase WU use. Deleting a namespace or deleting all records in a namespace using deleteAll uses 5 WUs.

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Storage

Storage costs are based on the size of an index on a per-Gigabyte (GB) monthly rate. For the latest storage pricing rates, see Pricing.

• The size of an index is defined as the total size of its records across all namespaces.
• The size of a single record is defined as the sum of the following components:
  • ID size
  • Dense vector size (equal to 4 * the dense dimensions)
  • Sparse vector size (equal to 9 * each non-zero sparse value)
  • Total metadata size (equal to the total size of all metadata fields)
  Sparse vector size is relevant only for sparse indexes and hybrid indexes.

The following tables demonstrate index sizes at different record counts:

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Imports

Importing from object storage is the most efficient and cost-effective method to load large numbers of records into an index. The cost of an import is based on the size of the records read, whether the records were imported successfully or not. If the import operation fails (e.g., after encountering a vector of the wrong dimension in an import with on_error="abort"), you will still be charged for the records read. However, if the import fails because of an internal system error, you will not incur charges. In this case, the import will return the error message "We were unable to process your request. If the problem persists, please contact us at https://support.pinecone.io". For the latest import pricing rates, see Pricing.

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Backups and restores

A backup is a static copy of a serverless index. Both the cost of storing a backup and restoring an index from a backup is based on the size of the index. For the latest backup and restore pricing rates, see Pricing.

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Embedding

Pinecone hosts several embedding models so it’s easy to manage your vector storage and search process on a single platform. You can use a hosted model to embed your data as an integrated part of upserting and querying, or you can use a hosted model to embed your data as a standalone operation. Embedding costs are determined by how many tokens are in a request. In general, the more words contained in your passage or query, the more tokens you generate. For example, if you generate embeddings for the query, “What is the maximum diameter of a red pine?”, Pinecone Inference generates 10 tokens, then converts them into an embedding. If the price per token for your billing plan is $.08 per million tokens, then this API call costs $.00001. To learn more about tokenization, see Choosing an embedding model. For the latest embed pricing rates, see Pricing.

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Reranking

Pinecone hosts several reranking models so it’s easy to manage two-stage vector retrieval on a single platform. You can use a hosted model to rerank results as an integrated part of a query, or you can use a hosted model to rerank results as a standalone operation. Reranking costs are determined by the number of requests to the reranking model. For the latest rerank pricing rates, see Pricing.

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Assistant

For details on how costs are incurred in Pinecone Assistant, see Assistant pricing.

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See also

• Manage cost
• Monitor usage
• Pricing