Pinecone
by Pinecone Systems Inc.
The vector database that makes AI knowledgeable.
Pinecone is a fully managed, serverless vector database that lets developers store, index, and search high-dimensional embeddings at scale for AI applications such as semantic search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
At a Glance
- Category
- Infrastructure & Cloud
- Pricing
- Freemium, Usage-based, Subscription
- Target Market
- Enterprise Developers, Data Scientists, ML Engineers, CTOs, AI/Platform Engineers
- Founded
- 2019
- Headquarters
- New York City, USA
- Customers
- 9,000+ customers and 800,000+ developers
Key Features
- ✓Serverless vector database
Object-storage-backed serverless architecture that automatically scales storage and compute without managing infrastructure.
- ✓Hybrid search
Supports dense, sparse, and full-text indexes through one API to combine semantic and keyword search in a single query.
- ✓Metadata filtering
Attach key-value metadata to vectors and filter queries to retrieve only records matching specified conditions.
- ✓Pinecone Inference
Hosted embedding and reranking models accessible via API so teams can generate and rerank vectors without managing separate model infrastructure.
- ✓Pinecone Assistant
Managed service for building grounded, RAG-based assistants over uploaded files with built-in retrieval and context management.
- ✓Enterprise security and reliability
Offers a 99.95% uptime SLA, encryption in transit and at rest, RBAC, SSO, private networking, and SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance.
Capabilities
Use Cases
- •Retrieval-augmented generation
Store document embeddings and retrieve relevant context to ground LLM responses and reduce hallucinations.
- •Semantic and hybrid search
Power low-latency similarity search across millions to billions of vectors combining semantic meaning and exact keyword matching.
- •AI agent memory and recommendations
Serve as scalable long-term memory and real-time recommendation infrastructure for AI agents and personalization systems.
Ideal For
Best For
- ✓Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for LLM applications
- ✓Production-scale semantic search and recommendation systems
- ✓Long-term memory and knowledge retrieval for AI agents
Integrations
Market & Ratings
9,000+ customers and 800,000+ developers
Market Analysis
Pros
- ✓Fully managed with zero infrastructure maintenance
- ✓Low-latency, high-scale similarity search (handles billions of vectors)
- ✓Developer-friendly API and strong Python/LangChain integration
- ✓Robust enterprise security and compliance
Cons
- ✗Closed-source (no self-hosting option)
- ✗Costs can scale quickly and predictability is a common complaint
- ✗Free Starter tier limits are reached quickly during experimentation
- ✗Standard plan carries a $50/mo minimum commitment
Pricing
Starter
$0
- ✓Free for small applications
- ✓Up to 2 GB storage
- ✓2M write units and 1M read units per month
- ✓AWS us-east-1 region only
- ✓1 project, up to 2 users
- ✓Community support
Standard
From $50/mo minimum
- ✓Pay-as-you-go beyond included $15/mo credits
- ✓Unlimited serverless, inference, and assistant usage
- ✓Choice of cloud and region (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- ✓Multiple projects and users
- ✓User and API key RBAC
- ✓Backup and restore
Enterprise
From $500/mo minimum
- ✓Everything in Standard
- ✓99.95% uptime SLA
- ✓SAML SSO
- ✓Private networking
- ✓Customer-managed encryption keys
- ✓Audit logs and HIPAA compliance
- ✓Pro support included
Dedicated
Contact for pricing
- ✓Custom dedicated infrastructure
- ✓Tailored configuration for high-throughput workloads
Paid plans (Standard, Enterprise) use usage-based pricing for read units, write units, and storage above monthly minimums. A Builder plan (~$20/mo flat) and annual-commit discounts are also offered. Prices reflect October 2025 structure.
Stay Ahead of the Curve
Weekly enterprise AI insights for technology leaders. No spam, no vendor pitches—unsubscribe anytime.
SubscribeRelated Products
SambaNova
Full-stack AI inference on custom dataflow chips — in the cloud, on-prem, or sovereign.
Upscale AI
The pure-play AI networking company building the full-stack fabric for GPU and XPU clusters
Prime Intellect
The open superintelligence stack — own your intelligence with custom compute, RL training, and inference in one platform.
Union.ai
The commercial platform for Flyte — build durable, dynamic AI workflows and agents in pure Python