The Serverless Trap
Pinecone and others moved from per-pod to serverless consumption pricing. Excellent for startups with bursty workloads. Dangerous for enterprises with sustained high query volume — costs can exceed committed capacity pricing.
Monitor Query Volume
Track query count, latency, and compute consumed per tenant or workload. Anomaly detection catches runaway consumption — a misconfigured agent can hit a vector DB 10,000 times per user session.
Caching Layer
Frequently-retrieved queries belong in a cache. Redis or similar in front of your vector DB absorbs high-hit-rate queries without paying the vector DB per lookup.
Right-Size Per Workload
Not every use case needs the premium vector DB. Low-traffic agents on pgvector. High-traffic customer-facing on Pinecone or Qdrant. Mixed deployment is normal at scale.