Pinecone

Pinecone is a vector database: a place to store your documents in a form AI can search by meaning. Ask "what's our refund policy for damaged items?" and it finds the right paragraph even if those exact words never appear. This is how most chatbots that answer from a company's own documents work, a setup called RAG (retrieval-augmented generation, where the AI looks things up before answering).

It's fully managed, so there are no servers to run, and it handles everything from a few thousand documents to billions. Pinecone Assistant goes further: upload PDFs and Word files and you get a ready-made chat that answers from them with citations, without building the search yourself. There's an MCP server and Claude Code plugin, so Claude can create indexes and search your data.

The catch is that it's for developers. A business owner won't use Pinecone directly, but it may sit behind a tool or app you have built. Paid plans also have monthly minimums, and Postgres-based options like Supabase now cover simple projects without a separate database.

• Developers
• AI startups
• Engineering teams

Developers and technical teams building AI apps or chatbots that need to search a company's own documents.

• Serverless vector database

  Store and search your data by meaning, with no servers to manage, from small projects to billions of records.

• Pinecone Assistant

  Upload PDFs, Word and text files and get a chat that answers from them with citations.

• Built-in embedding models

  Turn text into searchable form and re-rank results inside Pinecone, without another AI provider.

• Keyword and meaning search

  Combine exact keyword matching with search by meaning in the same index.

• MCP server and Claude plugin

  Let Claude create indexes, load data and run searches from Claude Code.

• Our pick

  Starter

  Free

  Learning and small projects.

  • Database, embeddings and Assistant
  • Limited storage and usage
  • Community support on Discord

• Builder

  $20/mo

  Solo developers and small teams.

  • Higher usage limits
  • Choose your cloud and region
  • Multiple projects and users

• Standard

  $50/mo minimum, then pay as you go

  Production apps.

  • Pay-as-you-go usage
  • Backups, SSO and role-based access
  • 3-week trial with $300 credit

• Enterprise

  $500/mo minimum, then pay as you go

  Large companies.

  • 99.95% uptime SLA
  • Private networking and audit logs
  • Run it in your own cloud

Prices in USD unless noted, checked 3 November 2026. Vendors change plans often, so confirm on their site before you buy.

Ways Pinecone can slot into your week.

1. 1

   A support bot that knows your policies

   Load your help docs and policies so a chatbot answers customers with the right paragraph.

2. 2

   Search your company's files

   Upload contracts, SOPs and proposals to Pinecone Assistant and ask questions across them.

3. 3

   Smarter product search

   Let shoppers search "comfy shoes for standing all day" and get relevant products.

It sits behind your app as the search layer, alongside your main database in Supabase or Neon and an AI model like Claude. Developers often wire it up through LangChain or similar frameworks.

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