How to compare the cost of using a hosted solution like Pinecone Vs building service on your own using OSS?

What is the cost of developing & hosting Milvus compared to Pinecone?

Hard to give a specific cost, but to consider:

  • Engineering cost for initial deployment
  • Engineering cost for maintenance, if you want to stay competitive will probably need to invest some time in keeping up with Milvus (or alternative) changes to solution
  • Security, Pinecone is SOC2 and HIPPA compliant, but if need on-prem it isn’t something Pinecone can do
  • Pinecone has continued monthly costs ($70 / month for 5M vectors at the moment)
  • What are SLA requirements

So in short, self-hosted has more engineering costs both upfront and maintenance, whereas managed you’re benefiting from economies of scale but cannot host on-prem — so pros/cons and exact costs will vary on your use-case, team, etc