Pinecone vs Qdrant vs pgvector — Which Vector DB for India RAG MVP (2026)

Originally published on rohitraj.tech

At 500K embeddings for an Indian RAG MVP, Pinecone Standard costs ~₹6,200/month, self-hosted Qdrant runs ~₹1,400/month on Hetzner, and pgvector inside the Postgres you already pay for adds ₹0. Here is the real cost math, recall benchmark on a Hindi+English corpus, and the migration story when you outgrow each.

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Read the full version with code samples, diagrams, and architecture details: Pinecone vs Qdrant vs pgvector — Which Vector DB for India RAG MVP (2026)

More engineering notes: rohitraj.tech/en/notes