Pricing report · 2026-08-22
We priced 21 vector databases so you don't have to
Same workloads, same rules, every vendor. The spread between the cheapest and the "default" choice at production scale is 17× — and the most expensive option isn't even the best-known one.
Why another comparison
Most vector-database comparisons are feature matrices copied from marketing pages. Almost none of them tell you what a workload will actually cost, because pricing pages are full of capacity units (search units, OCUs, VCUs, nodes), regional multipliers, and free tiers that quietly expire.
We maintain a live comparison tool backed by a catalog of 21 vendors whose rates are hand-captured from official pricing pages and public APIs — each row carries a provenance date (21 of them stamped 2026-08-22). This report runs all of them through three fixed benchmark workloads and reports USD-normalized monthly totals, EU region.
The headline finding
At the mid-scale workload (1M vectors, 1M queries/month), prices range from $1.19/mo to $350.43/mo. That's not a rounding difference — it's two different billing philosophies colliding:
- Metered serverless (Pinecone, Turbopuffer, Astra DB, Cloudflare Vectorize) bills per unit consumed, so small workloads stay near zero.
- Capacity floors (Azure AI Search search-units, AWS OpenSearch Serverless OCUs, Vertex AI nodes, Elasticsearch VCUs) bill for provisioned compute whether you query it or not.
The capacity-billed vendors aren't bad value — they're engineered for steady enterprise traffic where an SLA-backed floor is fine. But pointing a 100k-vector side project at any of them means paying $65–350/month for what costs under $3 elsewhere. At mid-scale, the floors look like this: Elasticsearch Serverless $65.78, Vertex AI Vector Search $68.48, Azure AI Search $73.73, AWS OpenSearch Serverless $350.43.
The numbers
RAG prototype
100,000 vectors · 1536-dim fp32 · 0.2M queries/mo
| # | Vendor | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $0 |
| 2 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $0 |
| 3 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $0.27 |
| 4 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $2.17 |
| 5 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $5.00 |
Mid-scale production
1,000,000 vectors · 768-dim int8 · 1M queries/mo
| # | Vendor | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $1.19 |
| 2 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $5.00 |
| 3 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $8.48 |
| 4 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $9.00 |
| 5 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $9.00 |
Large RAG
5,000,000 vectors · 768-dim int8 · 10M queries/mo
| # | Vendor | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $5.03 |
| 2 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $8.48 |
| 3 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $11.81 |
| 4 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $16.34 |
| 5 | Compare vs Pinecone → | $17.23 |
Three takeaways
- Free tiers are real now. Qdrant Cloud and Zilliz Cloud both land at $0 on the prototype workload; Astra DB at $0.27. For a hobby RAG project there is no reason to pay anything in 2026.
- The "default" choice carries a premium that grows with scale. Pinecone Serverless runs 7.6× the cheapest option at mid-scale and 17× at the large workload ($85.43 vs $5.03). Sometimes the managed convenience is worth it — but it should be a decision, not a default.
- Self-hosting still anchors the market. pgvector on a €4-classes Hetzner VPS holds a top-3 spot at both mid-scale and large workloads (~$8.48/mo) — the reason every managed vendor has to justify its margin.
Method & honesty notes
- Rates captured from official pricing pages / public APIs; capture date recorded per vendor row (
pricingCapturedAt). Azure figures cross-checked against Microsoft's Retail Prices API; Vertex node rates against Google's published us-central1 table. - Vendors that bill capacity rather than queries carry engineering-estimate query allowances — documented in their catalog rows, not hidden.
- EUR-denominated vendors are converted at the tool's fixed FX rate before ranking.
- Region-filtered ranking: US-only vendors (e.g. Chroma Cloud) are excluded from these EU-workload tables, which is why the count reads fewer than 21 where applicable.
- Prices change. The compare tool always reflects the current catalog; this article is a snapshot dated 2026-08-22.