What is Warehouse Pricing
Warehouse Pricing - A pricing model that charges for ingestion and storage tiers rather than per query.
A pricing model that charges for data ingestion and storage tiers rather than per-query or per-vector fees. Warehouse pricing aligns costs with value creation: you pay to decompose files into features (extraction), pay based on which storage tier holds them (hot vs. warm), and query for free because the value was created at ingestion time.
How It Works
Costs are incurred at two points: when files are processed (extraction compute) and when features are stored (tier-based storage). Hot storage (active vector indexes) carries a higher per-GB cost but enables sub-10ms retrieval. Warm storage (S3 Vectors) costs roughly 90% less but adds query latency. Queries themselves do not generate per-call charges because the expensive work happened at ingest time.
Key Benefits
- Predictable costs that scale with data volume, not query traffic
- No surprise bills from high-traffic retrieval workloads
- Encourages front-loading work at ingestion time, producing richer and more reusable features
- Aligns vendor incentives with data quality rather than query volume
When to Use It
- When your application has unpredictable or bursty query traffic
- When you want to amortize extraction cost over a long retrieval lifetime
- When comparing total cost of ownership against per-query API pricing at scale
- When building internal tools where query volume is hard to forecast but corpus size is known