RAG Vector DB Cost 2027 Calculator
Calculate vector database cost for RAG systems — document count, chunks per document, embedding dimensions, monthly queries, and provider pricing for Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant Cloud, and self-hosted pgvector. Plus embedding generation cost from your model.
What Drives Vector DB Cost
Three cost drivers: storage (total vector count times dimensions times bytes per dimension, typically 4 bytes for FP32 or 1 byte for binary quantized), query volume (queries per second peak times time-of-day pattern), and embedding generation (one-time at ingest, recurring on updates). Storage cost dominates for small-query systems; query cost dominates for high-traffic chatbots. Embedding cost is a one-time line that returns when you re-embed at model upgrades.
Total Monthly Cost
Storage Cost = Vectors × Dimensions × Bytes × Provider Storage $/GB
Query Cost = Monthly Queries × Provider Per-Query $
Embedding Cost = Tokens Embedded × Embedding Model Price (one-time)
Provider Pricing as of 2026
Pinecone Serverless: storage USD 0.33/GB/month, reads USD 8.25 per million query units. Pinecone Pods: USD 70-700/month per pod. Weaviate Cloud: starts USD 25/month, scales by data size. Qdrant Cloud: USD 25/month starter, USD 0.014/hour per node larger. pgvector self-hosted: free software, USD 50-500/month managed Postgres infrastructure depending on size. Turbopuffer: USD 3.33/GB/month with included query allowance, popular for budget-constrained RAG.
Embedding Model Pricing
OpenAI text-embedding-3-small: USD 0.02 per million tokens (1536 dimensions). OpenAI text-embedding-3-large: USD 0.13 per million tokens (3072 dimensions). Cohere embed-english-v3.0: USD 0.10 per million tokens (1024 dimensions). Voyage AI voyage-3: USD 0.06 per million tokens (1024 dimensions). Self-hosted BGE-large: free per-query plus GPU hosting. Most B2B RAG systems use text-embedding-3-small as the default — cheap, good enough for English.
Common Cost Mistakes
Three errors that blow up vector DB budgets: (1) re-embedding on every nightly refresh instead of diffing for changes — multiplies embedding cost 30-100x, (2) over-chunking documents (5 chunks per page when 2 would do) — 2.5x storage cost for no quality gain, (3) running production on serverless when you have steady QPS — pods or self-hosted is 50-80 percent cheaper at sustained 10+ QPS. Always run a 30-day pilot before committing to a tier.
Sources: Pinecone Pricing 2026, Weaviate Cloud Pricing 2026, Qdrant Cloud Pricing 2026, OpenAI Embeddings Pricing 2026, Voyage AI Pricing 2026. Last updated: April 2026.