Pinecone is a fully managed vector database and AI knowledge platform that gives AI agents fast, accurate retrieval over enterprise data at predictable cost.
About
Pinecone is a fully managed vector database and AI knowledge platform that solves the retrieval problem behind AI applications: how to give agents, search, and recommendation systems fast, accurate access to large amounts of data without cost growing uncontrollably as usage scales. It combines a serverless vector database, the Nexus knowledge engine for agents, and a marketplace, serving more than 10,000 customers and 1 million developers. Founded in 2019 by Edo Liberty and based in New York, Pinecone Systems lets teams store dense and sparse vectors alongside full-text search in one index, with automatic indexing and consistent query latency. Developers install a plugin in their agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, Gemini CLI) or call the API directly to search, upsert, and rerank against the same index. Named customers include Microsoft, Adobe, Workday, OpenAI, and Zapier.
Key Features
Pricing & Fees
- Pricing: A free Starter plan; Builder at $20/month flat; Standard at $50/month minimum usage with a 3-week trial including $300 credits; Enterprise at $500/month minimum usage, all pay-as-you-go above the minimum.
- Compliance certifications: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001, with a 99.95% uptime SLA on Enterprise.
- Scale: Architecture supports billions of vectors and thousands of queries per second, with up to 100,000 namespaces per index on Standard and 1,000,000 on Enterprise.
- Support: Community support via Discord on lower plans; Pro support included with Enterprise, and uptime and support SLAs available.
Who It's For
Pinecone is built for AI/ML engineers and backend developers building RAG pipelines, semantic search, recommendation systems, and AI agents that need reliable retrieval over enterprise data. Production teams benefit from managed scaling, backup and restore, and observability integrations such as Prometheus and Datadog. Security and compliance leads in regulated industries can rely on HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certifications, RBAC, SSO, and BYOC deployment. Solo developers and small teams can start on the free or Builder tiers before moving to pay-as-you-go production plans.
FAQ
What is Pinecone?Pinecone is a fully managed vector database and AI knowledge platform that stores embeddings and serves fast, accurate search for AI agents, RAG applications, and recommendation systems.
Does Pinecone have a free plan?Yes, the Starter plan is free and includes Pinecone Database On-Demand, Inference, Assistant, and dense, sparse, and full-text indexes with community support.
What integrations and platforms does Pinecone support?It works via API and SDKs, MCP servers, and plugins for agent tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, and Gemini CLI, and it is available on the AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft marketplaces.
How does Pinecone compare to a traditional RAG loop?In its own benchmark testing, the Nexus product replaced multi-step retrieval with a single query, using 85–97% fewer tokens and completing tasks up to 30x faster than agentic RAG.
Is Pinecone secure and compliant?It offers encryption at rest and in transit, SSO, RBAC, CMEK, and private networking, and holds SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001 certifications with a 99.95% uptime SLA on Enterprise.
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