Pinecone vs Qdrant vs pgvector: The True Cost of Vector Storage

When building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) apps, indexing embeddings is only half the battle. Storing millions of 1536-dimensional vectors requires dedicated vector databases.

Let us compare the monthly hosting costs across popular vector database providers.

Storage Requirements Explained

Each 1536-dimensional float32 vector takes approximately 6KB of raw memory. When you add HNSW index overhead, 1 million vectors require about 8GB of high-speed RAM.

Hosting Pricing Breakdown

1. 1Pinecone Serverless: Pay per read/write unit plus $0.33 per GB storage.

1. 2Qdrant Cloud: Dedicated node pricing starting around $25/mo for 4GB RAM.

1. 3Self-Hosted pgvector: Free software license, pay only for your Postgres Cloud server instance.

Key Performance & Financial Decisions

• For MVP projects under 100K vectors: Use pgvector inside your existing Postgres database.

• For production apps with 1M+ vectors: Move to dedicated vector databases like Qdrant or Pinecone for sub-20ms search latency.

Calculate Your Vector Costs

Use our interactive Vector Database Cost Calculator to estimate your monthly vector RAM and storage fees.