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$embeddingcost

Vector Database Pricing: Pinecone vs Weaviate vs Qdrant vs pgvector (April 2026)

Embedding generation is a one-time cost. Storage is forever. This page covers the storage formula, the major vector database options at real-world scales, and the dimension-reduction savings nobody mentions.

Verified April 2026

Storage Cost Calculator

1,000,000 vectors x 1536 dims x 4 bytes = 5.7 GB
Pinecone Serverless
Cold start 200ms-2s
$1.89/mo
Qdrant Cloud
1M free vectors
$0.69/mo
Weaviate Cloud
Free tier available
$0.54/mo
Zilliz Cloud
Best for 1B+ scale
$0.57/mo
pgvector (self-hosted)
Near-zero on existing DB
$0.13/mo

Storage only. Add query/read costs for Pinecone serverless and Qdrant Cloud. Binary encoding requires Titan V2 (AWS) or custom quantization.

The Storage Formula

Each embedding vector is stored as 32-bit floats. The raw storage size before index overhead:

bytes = vectors x dimensions x 4
# Example: 1M vectors at 1536 dims
= 1,000,000 x 1,536 x 4 = 5.72 GB
# Add 20-40% for HNSW index overhead
effective = ~7-8 GB total

Managed vector databases charge for both the raw vectors and the index. HNSW index adds 20-40% overhead on top of raw vector storage. For pricing purposes, most providers bill for total storage used, including index. The calculator above uses raw vector math; add ~30% for real-world managed DB estimates.

Monthly Storage Cost by Scale

ScaleRaw sizePinecone ServerlessQdrant CloudWeaviate CloudZilliz Cloudpgvector
1M vectors (1536d)5.7 GB$2/mo$0.69/mo$0.54/mo$0.57/mo$0.13/mo
10M vectors (1536d)57.2 GB$19/mo$7/mo$5/mo$6/mo$1/mo
100M vectors (1536d)572.2 GB$189/mo$69/mo$54/mo$57/mo$13/mo

Raw float32 storage. Add 20-40% for HNSW index overhead in practice. Query costs not included. Pinecone serverless also charges per read/write operation.

Provider-by-Provider Analysis

Pinecone

$0.33/GB/month (serverless)
Strengths
  • + Purpose-built vector DB
  • + Generous free tier (100k vectors)
  • + Managed indexes, no ops burden
Watch out
  • - Cold start 200ms-2s on serverless
  • - Pod-based starts at $70/month minimum
  • - More expensive per GB than alternatives

Best for: prototypes and small production apps where ops burden is unacceptable. Serverless cold-start is the main risk for latency-sensitive applications.

Pricing page

pgvector

~$0.023/GB on self-hosted Postgres
Strengths
  • + Near-zero marginal cost on existing DB
  • + SQL-compatible; standard tooling
  • + No extra infrastructure
Watch out
  • - Scales to ~50M vectors before quality degrades
  • - HNSW index build time grows with data
  • - No built-in filtering at extreme scale

Best for: applications already on Postgres with under 50M vectors. The default choice for small-to-medium RAG applications. Move to a dedicated vector DB at scale.

Pricing page

Qdrant

$0.12/GB/month (Qdrant Cloud)
Strengths
  • + Strong filtering at scale
  • + Open-source self-hosting option
  • + Rust-based; fast and memory efficient
Watch out
  • - Less managed tooling than Pinecone
  • - Sizing requires RAM+disk understanding

Best for: production RAG at medium scale (5M-500M vectors), especially with metadata filtering requirements. Self-hosting on EC2 is cost-effective at 50M+ vectors.

Pricing page

Weaviate Cloud

$0.095/GB/month
Strengths
  • + Lowest managed $/GB of major providers
  • + GraphQL and REST APIs
  • + BM25+vector hybrid search built-in
Watch out
  • - More complex setup than Pinecone
  • - Pricing tiers can be opaque

Best for: hybrid search (keyword + semantic) use cases. The BM25 integration is first-class and often eliminates the need for a separate keyword search layer.

Pricing page

Zilliz Cloud (Milvus)

$0.10/GB/month
Strengths
  • + Best for billion-scale corpora
  • + Open-source Milvus-compatible
  • + Strong horizontal scaling
Watch out
  • - Overkill for <10M vectors
  • - More operational complexity

Best for: billion-scale document corpora, media libraries, and enterprises with existing Milvus deployments. Comparable pricing to Qdrant with better 1B+ scale story.

Pricing page

Dimension Reduction: The Storage Shortcut

For models that support Matryoshka Representation Learning (OpenAI text-embedding-3-large, Google Gemini models), you can request fewer dimensions via the API. Storage cost scales linearly with dimensions:

DimensionsGB per 100M vecsPinecone cost/moSavings vs 3072d
3072 (full)1144.4 GB$378baseline
1536 (half)572.2 GB$189$189 saved
768 (quarter)286.1 GB$94$283 saved

For 100M vectors at 100M-scale, halving dimensions saves $189/month on Pinecone with minimal quality impact. MTEB score drop: roughly 1-2 points.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to store embeddings?
Storage cost = vectors x dimensions x 4 bytes. For 1M 1,536-dim vectors: 5.72 GB. At Pinecone serverless rates ($0.33/GB), that is $1.89/month. pgvector on an existing Postgres database is near-zero marginal cost.
How much does Pinecone cost for 1 million vectors?
For 1M 1,536-dim float32 vectors: 5.72 GB at $0.33/GB = $1.89/month storage on Pinecone serverless. Pinecone pod (p1.x1) starts at about $70/month for 1M vectors with no per-query charge. Serverless has cold-start latency (200ms-2s) on idle namespaces.
What are the limits of pgvector?
pgvector works well up to approximately 10-50 million vectors. Beyond that, IVFFlat and HNSW index build times become very long and query latency increases. At 100M+ vectors, managed vector databases are significantly better.
What is Pinecone serverless cold start?
Pinecone serverless scales down namespaces that have not received queries recently. The first query after inactivity can take 200ms to 2,000ms to warm up. For production applications with unpredictable traffic, this is a significant concern.
Is pgvector on Supabase free?
Supabase's free tier includes pgvector with 500MB database storage, which can hold approximately 85,000 1,536-dimension float32 vectors. Supabase Pro starts at $25/month with 8GB storage.
What is the cheapest vector database?
pgvector on an existing Postgres instance is cheapest at near-zero marginal cost. Among managed options, Weaviate Cloud ($0.095/GB) and Qdrant Cloud ($0.12/GB) are cheapest. Pinecone serverless is $0.33/GB.
Full calculator
Storage + embedding + query cost combined
Self-hosted break-even
When to stop using managed vector DBs
Optimization tips
Dimension reduction, binary embeddings
Disclaimer: Independent resource. Vector database pricing verified April 2026 from public pricing pages. Always confirm current pricing at each provider's pricing page before making architecture decisions.