I Run 5M Vectors on a $6/mo Server. Pinecone Would Charge Me $210.

Six months ago I moved my RAG pipeline from Pinecone to self-hosted Qdrant. My vector search bill went from $210/month to $6.50/month. Same latency. Same recall. Here's exactly how. The Setup My app does document Q&A for legal contracts. The numbers: 5.2 million vectors (1536-dim, OpenAI embeddings) ~800K queries/month P99 latency requirement: < 50ms On Pinecone Serverless, this cost me roughly $210/month — storage plus read units plus write units for daily ingestion of new documents. What I Moved To A single Hetzner CX32 server: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD €8.50/month (about $9.20) Qdrant running in Docker Automated daily backups to S3-compatible storage ($0.50/month) Total: ~$10/month. That's a 95% cost reduction. The Migration Was Easier Than Expected bash# Export from Pinecone (I used their scroll API) python export_pinecone.py --index legal-docs --output vectors.jsonl Start Qdrant docker run -d -p 6333:6333 -v ./storage:/qdrant/storage qdrant/qdrant Import python import_qdrant.py --input vectors.jsonl --collection legal-docs The whole migration took an afternoon. The Qdrant Python client is straightforward, and the API is surprisingly similar to Pinecone's. Performance Comparison I ran the same 10,000 test queries against both setups: MetricPinecone ServerlessQdrant Self-HostedP50 latency23ms4msP99 latency89ms12msRecall@100.970.97Monthly cost$210$10 The self-hosted Qdrant is actually faster because the data sits in memory on the same machine. Pinecone Serverless loads data from object storage on demand, which adds cold-start latency. When Self-Hosting Is a Bad Idea I want to be honest about the trade-offs: Don't self-host if: You have zero DevOps experience and no one on the team does You need 99.99% uptime SLA for enterprise customers Your vector count is growing unpredictably (10M one month, 100M the next) You're a team of 1-2 and every hour on infra is an hour not building product Do self-host if: Your scale is predictable (you know roughly how many vectors