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Embeddings DB Cost

Cheapest vector DB for your workload? Compare Pinecone, Postgres+pgvector, LanceDB, and Turbopuffer side-by-side.

Your numbers

Start from an example

Embedding size, e.g. 1536 for OpenAI text-embedding-3-small. Stored as float32 with 25% index overhead.

Result

Status: in range.Cheapest option
$7.53

Cheapest: LanceDB (object storage and requests only; add the server or function that runs queries). Cheapest with hosting included: Postgres+pgvector at $35. Index size 7.15 GB.

Pinecone
$50
Postgres + pgvector
$35
LanceDB (storage only)
$7.53
Turbopuffer
$64

Vendor cost comparison

Monthly cost per vendor for this workload — cheapest highlighted.

Pinecone
$50
Postgres+pgvector
$35
LanceDB
$7.53
Turbopuffer
$64
  • Pinecone: Pinecone Standard 2026-05: ~$16/M read units, $4/M write units, $0.33/GB-mo, $50/mo plan minimum. Queries approximated as read units.
  • Postgres+pgvector: DigitalOcean managed Postgres baseline ($35/mo, includes 25GB; $0.20/GB-mo overage). Self-hosted equivalent.
  • LanceDB: LanceDB on Cloudflare R2 list pricing 2026-04: $0.015/GB-mo, $4.50/M ops. Self-hosted compute not included.
  • Turbopuffer: Turbopuffer 2026-05: Launch tier $64/mo minimum; metered $0.10/GB-mo, $0.04/M reads, $2/M writes above the floor.

Figures from Pinecone, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Managed Databases and Turbopuffer, checked on May 25, 2026.

General business information, not legal, tax or financial advice. The result comes only from your inputs and the published method. How we check our numbers.

How to use it

  1. Enter your vector count, your embedding dimension, your queries per day, and your ingest (new vectors) per day. The tool estimates storage from vector count and dimension, then projects monthly cost across four vendors, so the two inputs that matter most are how many vectors you store and how heavily you query them, since one drives storage cost and the other drives operation cost. If you evict old vectors on a retention schedule, enter the vector count you actually keep, because storage is sized from that number.
  2. Read the per-vendor monthly cost for Pinecone, Postgres+pgvector, LanceDB, and Turbopuffer, the cheapest vendor, the cheapest monthly cost, and your estimated storage in gigabytes. Each vendor's pricing notes spell out the assumptions (plan minimums, per-gigabyte storage, per-million-operation rates) so you can see why the ranking comes out the way it does for your specific workload rather than a generic one.
  3. Use the ranking to understand which vendor wins at your scale, because the answer changes dramatically with workload shape. Managed services like Pinecone carry plan minimums that dominate at small scale, self-hosted Postgres+pgvector is cheap until storage grows large, and object-storage options like LanceDB shine for large-but-cold datasets. The cheapest vendor for a hobby project is rarely the cheapest at production query volume.
  4. Treat the dollar figures as infrastructure cost only, not total cost. The notes flag that some options exclude self-hosted compute or operational effort, so a vendor that looks cheapest on storage may cost more once you account for the engineering time to run it. Weigh the savings against your team's capacity to operate a database, especially for the self-hosted options.
  5. Re-run as your vector count grows, your query volume scales, or vendor pricing updates, since the crossover point where one vendor overtakes another shifts with workload. For a RAG or AI product, pair this with the AI stack cost tool so the vector database cost sits inside the full infrastructure picture rather than being optimised in isolation.

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Background on the Embeddings DB Cost

All resources for this calculator (1)
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Use it from code

The same calculation as a JavaScript module you can import. It runs where you import it, with no request, key or rate limit.

import { compute } from "https://aibizhub.io/engines/embeddings-db-cost.js";

Input and output contract, TypeScript types and the guide for agents.