Estimating Pinecone costs incl replicas

[silas]

Hello, I’m trying to better understand Pinecone pricing using the Price Estimator.

Scenario 1:

• Standard plan on GCP
• p1 pod type
• x2 pod size
• 2 pods
• 1 replica
  Estimate: $277/mo

At p1-x2 pricing of $0.1920/hour, this seems to imply that only 2 pods were used to calculate: $0.1920/hr x 720 hr/mo x 2 pods == $277/mo.

But I would have expected 3 pods (2 pods + 1 replica), for a cost of $415/mo.

Question: Is the first replica being included for free?

Scenario 2:
And then if I increase the replicas to 2 and keep everything the same, the price jumps to $553/mo.

• Standard plan on GCP
• p1 pod type
• x2 pod size
• 2 pods
• 2 replicas
  Estimate: $553/mo

Which implies the pricing is based on 4 pods (as would be expected): $0.1920/hr x 720 hr/mo x 4 pods == $553/mo

Question: But in this case, is the first replica no longer being included for free?

Thanks for your help!

[Cory_Pinecone]

Hi @silas,

The replica count is a bit of a misnomer. When replicas == 1, it just means there’s only a single cluster of pods running your index. Each replica greater than 1 means an additional cluster of equal pods has been added. You can think of replicas as indexed at ordinal 1 and not 0.

So 2 p1.x2 pods with a single replica is a total of 2 x2 pods. 2 p1.x2 pods with two replicas is 4 x2 pods.

I hope this clears up the confusion.

[silas]

Thanks! Just to confirm with a few more examples, are all of these correct?

[silas]

Based on this, I’d suggest a couple of wording updates to your pricing page and documentation.

I think it would be better to refer to clusters more prominently/specifically, e.g. “replicas clusters” vs just “replicas”.

Hope this helps.

[Cory_Pinecone]

Your understanding in the graphic is spot on. And your wording suggestion is a good one, I’ll pass that along to our marketing team. Thanks!