Since launching the Starter (free) plan two years ago, we’ve learned a lot about how people use it. Whether building a personal project or testing a prototype before upgrading, it turns out 99.1% of users utilize less than 20% of the capacity on their free account. In other words, while one p1 pod can store 500k 1536-dimensional embeddings, 99.1% of users store less than 100k embeddings (and 90.2% using less than 10k embeddings).
Meanwhile, demand for Pinecone has grown to extreme levels — with over 10k sign ups per day — and continues to climb. While we’re adding cloud capacity for free users, we’re also managing a quickly growing waitlist to minimize disruptions and keep Pinecone running as expected. We’ve always been committed to providing a free plan so developers can explore and build with vector databases, however, the unused capacity of the existing free plan is slowing down would-be users from doing just that. Unlocking this capacity would mean more users could access and start building with Pinecone.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.pinecone.io/learn/updated-free-plan/