Rate limits

Rate limits help protect your applications from misuse and maintain the health of our shared serverless infrastructure. They vary by pricing plan and apply to serverless indexes only. Request-per-second limits are enforced per namespace or per index, as noted in the Data operation throughput limits table, in addition to your read and write unit limits, so a request fails if it exceeds any applicable limit. When you exceed a limit, the request returns a 429 - TOO_MANY_REQUESTS and the error message names the limit, scope, and value. Most rate limits can be adjusted upon request. If you need higher limits, contact Support with details about your use case.

Indexes built on Dedicated Read Nodes are not subject to read unit limits for query, fetch, and list operations. For sizing and capacity planning guidance, see the Dedicated Read Nodes guide.

Monthly usage limits

Read units and write units measure resource consumption. To check your current usage, see Monitor usage and costs.

Metric	Starter plan	Builder plan	Standard plan	Enterprise plan
Read units per month per org	1,000,000	2,000,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
Write units per month per org	2,000,000	5,000,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
Embedding tokens per month per model	5,000,000	10,000,000	Unlimited	Unlimited

Monthly rerank request limits vary by model:

Reranking model	Starter plan	Builder plan	Standard plan	Enterprise plan
`cohere-rerank-4-fast`	Not available	Not available	Unlimited	Unlimited
`cohere-rerank-3.5`	Not available	Not available	Unlimited	Unlimited
`bge-reranker-v2-m3`	500	1,000	Unlimited	Unlimited
`pinecone-rerank-v0`	500	Not available	Unlimited	Unlimited

Reaching a monthly usage limit returns a 429 - TOO_MANY_REQUESTS. Upgrade your plan to continue.

Example error

Request failed. You've reached your read unit limit for the current month.
To continue reading data, upgrade your plan.

Data operation throughput limits

Metric	Starter plan	Builder plan	Standard plan	Enterprise plan
Upsert size per second per namespace	50 MB	50 MB	50 MB	50 MB
Query read units per second per index	2,000	2,000	2,000	2,000
Query requests per second per namespace	100	100	100	100
Update records per second per namespace	100	100	100	100
Update requests per second per namespace	100	100	100	100
Update by metadata requests per second per namespace	5	5	5	5
Update by metadata requests per second per index	500	500	500	500
Upsert requests per second per namespace	100	100	100	100
Fetch requests per second per index	100	100	100	100
List requests per second per index	200	200	200	200
Describe index stats requests per second per index	100	100	100	100
Delete requests per second per namespace	100	100	100	100
Delete records per second per namespace	5,000	5,000	5,000	5,000
Delete records per second per index	5,000	5,000	5,000	5,000
Delete by metadata requests per second per namespace	5	5	5	5
Delete by metadata requests per second per index	500	500	500	500

Exceeding a per-second throughput limit returns a 429 - TOO_MANY_REQUESTS. Implement retry logic with exponential backoff, pace your requests, consider Dedicated Read Nodes (which aren’t subject to per-second read limits) for high-throughput reads, or contact Support to raise a limit.

Example error

Request failed. You've reached the query QPS limit for namespace {namespace_name} ({limit} QPS). Pace your queries, consider Dedicated Read Nodes for your index, or contact Pinecone Support (https://app.pinecone.io/organizations/-/settings/support/ticket) to request a higher limit.

Model throughput limits

Per-minute token limits for embedding models:

Embedding model	Input type	Starter plan	Builder plan	Standard plan	Enterprise plan
`llama-text-embed-v2`	Passage	250,000	250,000	1,000,000	1,000,000
	Query	50,000	50,000	250,000	250,000
`multilingual-e5-large`	Passage	250,000	250,000	1,000,000	1,000,000
	Query	50,000	50,000	250,000	250,000
`pinecone-sparse-english-v0`	Passage	250,000	250,000	3,000,000	3,000,000
	Query	250,000	250,000	3,000,000	3,000,000

Per-minute request limits for reranking models:

Reranking model	Starter plan	Builder plan	Standard plan	Enterprise plan
`cohere-rerank-4-fast`	Not available	Not available	300	300
`cohere-rerank-3.5`	Not available	Not available	300	300
`bge-reranker-v2-m3`	60	60	60	60
`pinecone-rerank-v0`	60	Not available	60	60

Reaching a per-minute model limit returns a 429 - TOO_MANY_REQUESTS. Upgrade your plan to increase it, or implement retry logic with exponential backoff.

Example error

Request failed. You've reached the max embedding tokens per minute (<limit>) model '<model name>' and input type '<passage|query>' for the current project.
To increase this limit, upgrade your plan.

Inference request limits

Metric	Starter plan	Builder plan	Standard plan	Enterprise plan
Inference requests per second per project	100	100	100	100
Inference requests per minute per project	2,000	2,000	2,000	2,000

Exceeding the per-second or per-minute limit returns a 429 - TOO_MANY_REQUESTS. Implement retry logic with exponential backoff to handle it.

Example error

Request failed. You've reached the max inference requests per second (<limit>) for the current project.

The message names the per-second or per-minute limit, whichever you exceeded.

APIs

Database

Inference

Admin

SDKs

CLI

Tools

Monthly usage limits

Data operation throughput limits

Model throughput limits

Inference request limits

​Monthly usage limits

​Data operation throughput limits

​Model throughput limits

​Inference request limits

Monthly usage limits

Data operation throughput limits

Model throughput limits

Inference request limits