What is the difference between serverless and provisioned vector database pricing?

Serverless pricing charges for actual usage like reads, writes, and storage, with no fixed node cost, ideal for variable or low-volume workloads. Provisioned pricing charges a fixed rate for dedicated nodes or pods regardless of utilization, which is predictable and cheaper at steady high volume. Pinecone offers both models explicitly, Qdrant Cloud offers cluster-based pricing, and self-hosted deployments are purely provisioned. Serverless suits early-stage products with spiky traffic, while provisioned suits mature products with predictable load.