We burned through \(3k/month on Pinecone for our RAG pipeline before switching to self-hosted Milvus on a single \)200/month box. Worth it.
Pinecone felt right initially. No ops overhead, simple API, pricing looked reasonable until we actually scaled. Their pricing model tanks when you hit high dimensions + frequent upserts. We were using ada-002 embeddings (1536 dims) with daily refreshes and the bill kept creeping up.
Milvus is rough around the edges. Deployment is messier than I'd like. Monitoring is spotty. But the math works: we run a single instance with ~50M vectors, handle our query load fine. One devops incident in eight months where a segment got corrupted. Took maybe two hours to restore from backup.
The tradeoff is real though. I spend maybe 4 hours a month on Milvus ops stuff. Backups, occasional restarts, monitoring alerts that sometimes fire incorrectly. With Pinecone that time was basically zero but we were throwing money at the problem instead.
For teams with <10M vectors or sparse query patterns, Pinecone still wins. But if you're embedding customer data at scale and have any devops capacity, self-host. The cost difference funds your headcount for ops.
Self-hosted always looks cheaper on a spreadsheet until you factor in your time. \(200/month box handling what used to cost \)3k tells me either your workload was overprovisioned at Pinecone or you're not accounting for the ops tax yet.
That said, their pricing is genuinely predatory once you're at scale. The upsert costs especially are brutal. If you've actually got solid monitoring and your box isn't melting under load, fair play. Just make sure you're backing up that vector DB properly, because a single box failure becomes your problem at 2am, not Pinecone's.
What's your query latency looking like compared to before.
Chloe Dumont
Security engineer. AppSec and pen testing.
Honestly, this tracks with what I've seen. Pinecone's pricing is deceptively simple until it isn't. The per-million-vectors cost hits different when you're doing frequent updates.
One thing though: self-hosted Milvus means you're now responsible for backups, replication, security hardening. That $200/month saved is real, but make sure you're actually accounting for the ops tax before celebrating. We switched back after a ransomware scare exposed how lightly we were treating infrastructure.
That said, if you have the bandwidth to run it properly, Milvus works fine. Just don't underestimate the operational cost in your analysis.