AssemblyAI vs Pinecone Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| AssemblyAI | Pinecone | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | $20/mo |
| Number of plans | 2 | 4 |
| Free plan | ||
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | usage-based | hybrid |
Pay as you go
- Universal-3.5 Pro ($0.21/hr)
- Universal-2 ($0.15/hr)
- Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime ($0.45/hr)
- Universal-Streaming ($0.15/hr)
- Universal-Streaming Multilingual ($0.15/hr)
- Sync API ($0.45/hr)
- Voice Agent API ($4.50/hr)
- Speaker Diarization ($0.02/hr pre-recorded, $0.12/hr realtime)
- Medical Mode ($0.15/hr)
- Keyterms Prompting
- Prompting ($0.05/hr)
- Speaker Identification ($0.02/hr)
- Translation ($0.06/hr)
- Custom Formatting ($0.03/hr)
- Entity Detection ($0.08/hr)
- Sentiment Analysis ($0.02/hr)
- Auto Chapters ($0.08/hr)
- Key Phrases ($0.01/hr)
- Topic Detection ($0.15/hr)
- Summarization ($0.03/hr)
- Profanity Filtering ($0.01/hr)
- PII Audio Redaction ($0.05/hr)
- PII Text Redaction ($0.08/hr)
- Content Moderation ($0.15/hr)
- LLM Gateway
- No minimum commitments
- No credit card required to start
Custom
- Custom rate limits
- Enhanced concurrency
- Enterprise-grade flexibility
- Volume-based pricing
- Custom starting concurrency limits
Starter
- Pinecone Database On-Demand
- Pinecone Inference
- Pinecone Assistant
- Dense, Sparse, and Full-Text Indexes
- Console Metrics
- Community Support via Discord
Builder
- Increased usage limits
- Choose your cloud and region
- Multiple projects and users
- Prometheus and Datadog monitoring
- Free support
- Response SLAs available via Developer or Pro support add-on
Standard
Popular- Pay-as-you-go for Database On-Demand, Inference, and Assistant Usage
- Choose your cloud and region
- Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN)
- Import from object storage
- Backup and Restore
- RBAC
- SSO (SAML 2.0)
- HIPAA add-on
- Free support
- Response SLAs available via Developer or Pro support add-on
Enterprise
- 99.95% Uptime SLA
- Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)
- Private Endpoints
- Customer Managed Encryption Keys
- Audit Logs
- Service Accounts
- SAML roles
- SCIM
- HIPAA Compliance
- Pro support included
AssemblyAI vs Pinecone FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. AssemblyAI uses usage-based pricing, while Pinecone goes with hybrid. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. AssemblyAI: They're positioning as the developer-friendly, API-first alternative to Deepgram and Rev AI — competitive on price at scale but differentiated by the breadth of AI features (LLM Gateway, multichannel, etc.). The AWS Marketplace listing signals they're actively chasing enterprise procurement budgets.
Still deciding? See the best AssemblyAI alternatives or the best Pinecone alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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