I joined Pinecone five months ago to lead product-led growth. My focus: what it takes to go from building to scaling on the platform.
Talking to customers, I learned what they were building: legal research tools, medical search assistants, educational knowledge bases replacing scattered docs and whitepapers. Real products, with real users, doing real work.
What I heard consistently was that while the Starter tier is generous, free and capable enough to get a lot done, it started to feel tight past the prototype stage. The next available tier is Standard at $50/month, which is reasonable for teams already at scale, but hard to justify when your usage is still early and your workload generates nowhere near that every month. Having worked on developer tooling for close to a decade, much of it in open source, I recognized this friction immediately. Making powerful tooling accessible without surprising developers on cost was the job.
Builder is our attempt to fix that: a $20/month flat-rate plan designed for builders who've outgrown Starter, are ready to take their app to production, but haven't yet reached the scale that justifies Standard.
What Builder is designed for
The limits on Builder are based on what we know about how thousands of builders at this stage actually work.
- 10 indexes keeps dev, staging, and production as separate environments without having to tear one down to spin up another.
- 1,000 namespaces per index lets you give each user or tenant an isolated space, which is usually what takes a product from internal tool to something shippable.
- 200 assistants per project supports document-heavy products where every user or use case gets its own context.
- More storage and usage headroom to scale comfortably at this stage.
Builder also includes free support, which tends to matter more than you'd expect the moment your users are real.
One note on availability: Builder runs on aws-us-east-1 today. Multi-region and multi-cloud support across AWS, GCP, and Azure are coming soon.
For the full breakdown, see the pricing page.
Which tier fits your stage
Builder fills a specific gap. Pinecone now has four tiers, each sized for a distinct stage of building, and Builder slots in between Starter and Standard.
Starter is free, and it's not a demo. With enough storage, indexes, and usage to build something real and take it pretty far. Most people who stay on Starter eventually need to create a second project, add a teammate, or create more indexes as their architecture evolves. That's the natural point where Starter starts to feel tight.
Builder is for when those ceilings start to matter. When you want to add a teammate, spin up another project, or build out an architecture that needs more indexes. Maybe it's a side project that picked up users faster than you expected. Maybe it's a startup product six weeks from launch. Maybe it's an internal tool your team depends on. Builder is sized for that stage: more indexes, more projects, more teammates, and a flat monthly cost that fits where you are.
Standard is for teams with established workloads who want to pay proportionally to scale. When you're there, usage-based pricing is the right call — and Standard is built for it.
Enterprise is for organizations with more complex requirements — dedicated infrastructure, advanced security and compliance, SLAs, and support built around how larger teams operate. If you're evaluating Pinecone at that level, reach out directly.
Available today
Builder is available today. Anyone who upgrades to Builder before May 31st gets their first month free — no code needed, applied automatically when you upgrade.
I believe infrastructure pricing should match the stage of building, not just the scale of it. Builder is our version of that to enable actively building, shipping, growing.
We've sized the limits based on what we know, and we'll keep adjusting as we learn how teams use the plan. If something specific isn't working for you, tell us! You can reach us at our Discord channel. Feedback is how this gets better.
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