Downgrade your plan

Downgrade your Pinecone subscription from a paid tier back to the free Starter plan, including steps to review usage limits before switching.

Before you downgrade

When you downgrade to the Starter plan in the Pinecone console, you choose which projects, indexes, assistants, and members to keep, up to the Starter plan limits: 1 project, 5 serverless indexes in the us-east-1 region of AWS, 5 assistants, and 2 members. Pinecone deletes everything you don't keep, along with all backups, backup schedules, and collections.

The downgrade doesn't reduce your data or change your configuration, so do this first:

Move any serverless indexes outside the us-east-1 region of AWS that you want to keep. Create a new index in us-east-1, re-upsert your data, and delete the old index before you start the downgrade. Indexes in other regions can't be kept on Starter.
Migrate any dedicated read node indexes whose data you want to keep. They can't run on Starter and there's no self-serve conversion. If the index is in us-east-1, back it up and restore it (this creates a new on-demand serverless index in the same region), then delete the original and keep the restored index during the downgrade. If it's in another region, create a new us-east-1 index and re-upsert your data as described above. You can also contact Support to migrate back.
Migrate any pod-based indexes whose data you want to keep. Migrate each one to serverless and finish creating the new serverless index before you start the downgrade: the migration saves your index as a collection, and the downgrade deletes all collections.
Move any eu-region assistants you want to keep to us. Recreate them in us and re-upload their files. eu assistants you don't move are deleted.
Disconnect your organization's SSO connection.
Reassign or remove members whose organization role isn't available on the Starter plan.
Get under the Starter storage limits. Do this last, after the migrations above, which can briefly leave a second copy of an index: no more than 2 GB of data across your serverless indexes and 1 GB of assistant storage. Delete records and assistant files to fit.

Downgrade to the Starter plan

The downgrade process is different depending on how you are paying for Pinecone.

If you are paying with a credit card, downgrade as follows:

In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
Click Downgrade in the Starter plan section.

Your billing will end immediately. However, you will receive a final invoice for any charges accrued in the current month.

If you are paying through the Google Cloud Marketplace, downgrade as follows:

In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
In the Starter section, click Downgrade.
Click Confirm downgrade.
On the Continue your downgrade on the GCP marketplace modal, click Continue to marketplace. This takes you to your orders page in Google Cloud Marketplace.
Cancel the order for your Pinecone subscription.If you don't see the order, check that the correct billing account is selected.

Your billing will end immediately. However, you will receive a final invoice for any charges accrued in the current month.

If you are paying through the AWS Marketplace, downgrade as follows:

In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
In the Starter section, click Downgrade.
Click Confirm downgrade.
On the Continue your downgrade on the AWS marketplace modal, click Continue to marketplace. This takes you to the Manage subscriptions page in the AWS Marketplace.
Cancel the subscription to Pinecone.

Your billing will end immediately. However, you will receive a final invoice for any charges accrued in the current month.

If you are paying through the Microsoft Marketplace, downgrade as follows:

In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
In the Starter section, click Downgrade.
Click Confirm downgrade.
On the Continue your downgrade on Microsoft marketplace modal, click Continue to marketplace.
On the SaaS page, click your subscription to Pinecone.
Click Cancel subscription.
Confirm the cancellation.

Your billing will end immediately. However, you will receive a final invoice for any charges accrued in the current month.

Switch from Standard to Builder

If you are on the Standard plan with credit/debit card billing and would like to switch to the Builder plan (flat $20/month), do the following:

Bring your organization under the Builder plan quotas. In particular, you must be within the Builder plan limits for projects, indexes, namespaces, storage, users, and monthly usage units.
In the Pinecone console, go to Settings > Billing > Plans.
Click Switch to Builder in the Builder plan section.
Confirm the change.

After switching, overages are no longer billed—requests that exceed Builder quotas are blocked instead. If you need more capacity, upgrade back to Standard or Enterprise at any time.

If you pay through a cloud marketplace, you can't switch to the Builder plan at this time. Contact Support to be notified when this migration becomes available.