← Vector Database Cost Calculator
This calculator vs. doing the math yourself
Reading each provider's pricing page for its current rates is still on you either way -- this tool never fetches or asserts a vendor's price. What it takes off your plate is sizing the index correctly and running the free-tier-and-rate arithmetic across every provider without a slip.
What each approach actually involves
Doing it yourself means opening each provider's pricing
page, noting its storage rate, its query rate, and any free allowance, then
estimating how big your index actually is. The estimate most people reach
for by hand is vectorCount × dimension × 4 bytes,
converted to gigabytes -- the raw embedding size. Then, for every provider:
subtract its free storage and query allowance from your totals, multiply
each remainder by that provider's rate, add storage cost to query cost, and
repeat for the next provider.
This calculator takes the same rates a pricing-page lookup gives you and the same vector count, dimension, and metadata size you would estimate from by hand -- plus an index-overhead multiplier you set yourself, the piece a raw-bytes shortcut leaves out -- and runs the storage sizing and the per-provider free-tier-and-rate arithmetic for up to three providers at once, ranked cheapest first.
| Worked example | Doing it yourself (raw vectors only) | This calculator |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000,000 vectors × 1536 dimensions, 200 B metadata/vector, 1.3× index overhead | 5.72 GB — vectorCount × dimension × 4, metadata and overhead left out | 7.68 GB — raw vectors + metadata, ×1.3 overhead |
| Provider A: $0.33/GB storage, $8/million queries, no free tier — at 5 million queries/month | $41.89/month total | $42.53/month total |
| Provider B: $0.25/GB storage, $5/million queries, 1 GB + 1 million queries free — at 5 million queries/month | $21.18/month total | $21.67/month total |
The two totals are the calculator's own default inputs, so you can load them on the calculator page and check the arithmetic yourself. The raw-vectors-only shortcut understates this index's storage by about 26% (5.72 GB against the real 7.68 GB) because it counts float32 embeddings only and leaves out both the metadata payload and the index structure a deployed database actually builds on top of them -- the exact gap this calculator's own index overhead field exists to let you account for instead of guessing away. Query cost happens to dominate both totals here, so the ranking does not flip in this example -- but the dollar gap between the two storage estimates scales with index size, and on a storage-heavy workload with a provider's free tier sized close to your real footprint, an understated estimate is exactly the kind of error that puts you on the wrong side of a free-tier boundary without knowing it.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| I want a provider's current storage and query rates, or its free-tier terms. | The provider's own pricing page — this calculator never fetches or asserts that for you. |
| I want to know how many gigabytes my specific index (vector count, dimension, metadata) actually occupies once the index structure is built, not just the raw vectors. | This calculator's storage estimator, with the overhead multiplier you set. |
| I'm comparing two or three providers and want the free-tier-and-rate arithmetic run consistently across all of them, the same way, every time my workload changes. | This calculator — free, instant, private, no account. |
| I only have one provider in mind and just want its documented plan details. | That provider's own pricing page. |
This tool needs no account and no sign-in: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and once it has loaded it keeps working with the connection off.
Common questions
Why not just read each provider's pricing page and do the arithmetic myself?
You still have to -- this calculator does not fetch or assert any vendor's price, so the rates always come from you reading the vendor's own current pricing page. What doing it by hand also requires is sizing your index in gigabytes first, then for every provider you are comparing: subtracting its free storage and query allowance, multiplying the remainder by its rate, and adding storage cost to query cost. That is a few minutes of careful arithmetic per provider, repeated for each one, with no check on whether a subtraction or a decimal point slipped.
What does a hand-rolled storage estimate usually get wrong?
The shortcut most people reach for is vectorCount times dimension times 4 bytes, then convert to gigabytes and stop there. That is the raw embedding size only. A deployed index adds structure on top of it -- an HNSW graph, quantization bookkeeping, replication -- plus whatever metadata payload rides along with each vector, and both are easy to leave out of a back-of-envelope number because they are not part of the obvious formula. See the worked example above for how much that omission understates the real footprint.
Is comparing three providers by hand really that error-prone?
Each provider adds its own free-storage allowance, free-query allowance, storage rate, and query rate -- four numbers to keep straight, repeated for every provider in the comparison, with a subtraction and two multiplications each. Getting one provider's arithmetic right by hand is easy. Keeping all of them consistent across three providers, and re-doing all of it the next time a rate or your workload changes, is where a hand count and a mechanical one start to diverge.
Does this calculator upload anything I enter?
No. Every field runs in your browser, the same as doing the arithmetic on paper -- there is no account, no server call, and no analytics vendor. The only difference is the calculator does not mis-add the columns.
Open the Vector Database Cost Calculator to size your own index, read what is index overhead, or see this calculator vs. Pinecone's own pricing page.