pgvector Pricing: Plans & Cost Guide 2026
Open Source is free, offering a complete vector database as a PostgreSQL extension compared to paid alternatives.
pgvector plans and pricing
Open Source
Open SourceBest for: You get a fully-featured, self-hosted PostgreSQL extension for vector search
- ✓Vector similarity search (L2 distance, inner product, cosine distance, L1 distance)
- ✓Exact and approximate nearest neighbor search
- ✓HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) indexing
- ✓IVFFlat (Inverted File with Flat Compression) indexing
- ✓ACID compliance and transactional safety via PostgreSQL
pgvector pricing: the quick answer
pgvector is free as of July 8, 2026. It is an open-source PostgreSQL extension under the MIT license, so there is no subscription, per-seat fee or usage meter for the software. You get exact and approximate nearest-neighbor search with HNSW and IVFFlat indexing across the usual distance metrics, up to 16,000 dimensions, all inside your existing Postgres tables with ACID guarantees. What you pay for is the database that runs it: your own server, or a managed host like Supabase, Neon or Railway. On Postgres already, the extension itself is free.
- Open SourceFree
pgvector is free to start, against a $65/mo median across 9 vector databases tools we track.
Pricing Expert Take
Independent analysis · pgvector
Value Analysis
pgvector is a free, open-source PostgreSQL extension under the MIT license, so the software carries no licensing fee at any scale. It handles vector similarity search across L2, cosine, inner-product and L1 distance, exact and approximate nearest-neighbor with HNSW and IVFFlat indexing, and up to 16,000 dimensions on HNSW, all inside your existing Postgres. For teams already running Postgres, it removes the need to stand up and pay for a separate vector database, which is the whole reason it has spread so fast.
Hidden Costs
- The extension is free, but the database it runs in is not: large vector indexes need real RAM, and provisioning that on a cloud instance or managed Postgres host drives the actual cost.
- Scaling performance means hands-on index tuning, so the real spend is engineering time or a managed provider's higher tier rather than any pgvector fee.
- Managed Postgres hosts such as Supabase, Neon and Railway each bill separately for the underlying database.
Red Flags
The risk is not billing but a performance wall: at tens of millions of vectors you can hit slow index builds and query latency that only faster hardware or add-on extensions fix.
"I tested pgvector on 5 million 512-dimensional vectors, and the performance was good enough."
"I heard that is does not scale pretty good on large..."
Based on analysis of recent Reddit and G2 discussions.
Green Wins
- No new infrastructure: it runs inside the Postgres you already operate.
- A SQL interface every backend developer already knows.
- ACID transactions across vectors and relational data in one place.
"surprise bills are the best argument for self-hosting your vector db."
Verdict
For any team already on PostgreSQL, pgvector is the obvious starting point and comfortably handles a few million vectors for the price of the hosting alone. If your dataset climbs into the tens of millions and RAM provisioning on the database gets expensive, that is the moment to weigh a dedicated managed vector store like Pinecone for query latency at scale.
What pgvector really costs
List price covers the subscription. Total cost of ownership for pgvector typically includes additional line items that don't appear on the pricing page.
pgvector price history
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Frequently asked questions
How does pgvector pricing compare?
See how pgvector's 1 pricing plans stack up against similar Vector Databases tools.
Research Reports
Sources & Data Trail · pgvector
- 1.Official Website·Official vendor website
- 2.G2·G2 verified user reviews · 3.8/5 · 12 reviews