AI economics
Embeddings DB Cost
Cheapest vector DB for your workload? Compare Pinecone, Postgres+pgvector, LanceDB, and Turbopuffer side-by-side.
Result
Cheapest: LanceDB (object storage and requests only; add the server or function that runs queries). Cheapest with hosting included: Turbopuffer at $16. Index size 7.15 GB.
Vendor cost comparison
Monthly cost per vendor for this workload — cheapest highlighted.
- Pinecone: Pinecone Standard 2026-10: $16/M read units, $4/M write units, $0.33/GB-mo, $50/mo plan minimum; a query here uses about 7.15 read units (1 per GB of namespace, minimum 0.25). Small workloads can fit the free Starter plan (up to 2 GB, 1M read and 2M write units a month) or Builder ($20/mo flat, up to 10 GB, 2M read and 5M write units).
- Postgres+pgvector: Supabase Pro 2026-10: $25/mo with $10 compute credit, 2XL compute ($410/mo, 32 GB RAM), disk above 8 GB at $0.125/GB-mo for about 14.31 GB (table plus HNSW index). Sized from Supabase's pgvector HNSW benchmarks (1536-d: Micro 15k vectors, Small 50k, Medium 100k, Large 224k, XL 500k, 2XL 1M), scaled by floats per vector and by RAM above 2XL.
- LanceDB: LanceDB on Cloudflare R2 2026-10: $0.015/GB-mo storage, $4.50/M writes (Class A), $0.36/M reads (Class B), one request per upsert and per query. Self-hosted compute not included.
- Turbopuffer: Turbopuffer Launch 2026-10: $16/mo minimum usage; $0.33/GB-mo logical storage, $2/GB written, $0.001/TB of data queried (namespace size, 1.28 GB minimum, discounted above 32 GB), $0.05/GB returned.
Figures from Pinecone, Cloudflare R2, Supabase pricing, Supabase compute sizes, Supabase pgvector compute benchmarks and Turbopuffer, checked on October 19, 2026.
How to use it
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, Postgres+pgvector on Supabase steps up a compute size each time the index outgrows memory, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The same numbers as a table
- Reference Embeddings DB cost by stored vectors and query volume
Precomputed by this calculator across common inputs, to cite or download as CSV.
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Background on the Embeddings DB Cost
- Alternatives Pinecone Alternatives for Vector Search (2026)
Pinecone alternatives in 2026: Qdrant, Weaviate, and pgvector compared on price and fit. Pinecone starts at $20/mo Builder; pgvector reuses your Postgres.
Articles
- 8 min read Pinecone Pricing 2026: Rates vs Qdrant (Official)
Pinecone pricing 2026: free Starter, $20/mo Builder, $50/mo Standard minimum, $16-18/M reads, $0.33/GB-month, vs Qdrant's free 1 GB RAM cluster.
- 11 min read Cheapest Vector Database 2026: 8 Managed Stores Ranked
Cheapest vector database 2026 ranked by verified prices at 1M vectors: Chroma Cloud wins near $5/mo, no minimum; Pinecone and Weaviate floor higher.
- 10 min read Embeddings DB vs Self-Host pgvector: True Cost
Embeddings DB vs pgvector true cost: Supabase pgvector is $125-$426/mo at 200k-1M vectors vs Turbopuffer $16; it wins if Postgres is already in use.
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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.