Packaging

Pinecone replaced its in-house billing engine with Orb for serverless usage pricing

Pinecone pricing

Pinecone's original billing system was built in-house but didn't support multi-product billing or complex metering — the team still calculated some invoices manually. When it launched serverless (read units / write units / storage), Pinecone adopted Orb as the system of record for all usage and billing data, enabling add-ons, discounts, custom plans, and version-controlled pricing without engineering bottlenecks. The RU/WU metering layer remains in-house; Orb handles invoicing and plan management.

From Pinecone's pricing timeline
Plan structure: Starter / Builder / Standard / Enterprise + BYOC

Four self-serve/sales tiers verified: Starter (free), Builder ($20 flat), Standard ($50 min), Enterprise ($500 min), plus Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) at custom pricing. Usage rates step up by tier. One-time $250 bulk-import credit (1 TB) for Standard/Enterprise through 2026-07-31.

About Pinecone
pinecone.io ↗

Pinecone is a managed serverless vector database that bills on three usage dimensions: read units (RU), write units (WU), and storage (per GB-month) — separated so reads, writes, and storage scale independently.

Free tier
Yes
Commits
Available
Transparency
public

Pinecone pricing history

  1. Jun 2026
    Plan structure: Starter / Builder / Standard / Enterprise + BYOC
  2. Aug 2024
    Serverless GA on Azure and GCP
  3. Jan 2024
    Pinecone Serverless launches — pricing flips to read/write/storage units
  4. Jan 2019
    Pinecone founded (pod-based managed vector DB)
Full Pinecone timeline
All pricing activity