[gk1]

> Who is even paying?

The homepage offers a few clues: Shopify, Gong, Zapier, HubSpot, Expel, and several thousand others. That includes huge enterprises who tend not to want their names shown publicly.

Basically there are many companies with tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions of embeddings. If they care about performance and reliability, and don't want to tie up an entire team of engineers to manage a self-hosted solution, then Pinecone makes a lot of sense for them.

In a way this also answers the many questions about "Pinecone vs [whatever]" ... If you're dealing with <1M embeddings the differences between your options will hardly matter — just pick whatever's easiest for you. If you're already using a managed DB that introduced something that's good enough for you... just use that. Though we still work hard to make Pinecone the easiest choice and have features that many basic solutions don't have, such as hybrid search (sparse + dense vector embeddings) for better search results.