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A Pinecone project belongs to an organization and contains a number of indexes and users. Only a user who belongs to the project can access the indexes in that project. Each project also has at least one project owner.

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Project environments

You choose a cloud environment for each index in a project. This makes it easy to manage related resources across environments and use the same API key to access them.

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Project roles

If you are an organization owner or project owner, you can manage who has access to a project. You grant a principal—a user, service account, or API key—access by assigning it one or more roles scoped to the project. A principal can hold more than one role, and its effective permissions are the union of all the roles it holds. The roles you assign depend on the principal type:
  • Users and service accounts are typically assigned a membership role—ProjectOwner, ProjectManager, or ProjectMember—optionally combined with one or more access roles.
  • API keys are typically assigned ProjectEditor or ProjectViewer, or one or more access roles. API keys cannot be assigned ProjectOwner, ProjectManager, or ProjectMember, which include access to project settings, members, and API keys. To access these items programmatically, use a service account.
The following project roles are available: The following table details the project settings, resource, and data permissions for the owner, manager, and member roles: Specific to pod-based indexes:
Customers who sign up for a Standard or Enterprise plan on or after August 18, 2025 cannot create pod-based indexes. Instead, create serverless indexes, and consider using dedicated read nodes for large workloads (millions of records or more, and moderate or high query rates).
Pod-based indexes do not support role-based access control and will always grant data plane read and write access to project members.

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Role permissions

The following tables detail the operations covered by the general, control plane, and data plane roles:

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General permissions

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Control plane permissions

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Data plane permissions

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API keys

Each Pinecone project has one or more API keys. In order to make calls to the Pinecone API, you must provide a valid API key for the relevant Pinecone project. For more information, see Manage API keys.

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Project IDs

Each Pinecone project has a unique project ID. To find the ID of a project, go to the project list in the Pinecone console.

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See also