John, I’m answering to you but I am speaking to everyone. I understand your frustration and appreciate you trusting us with your workloads. I hope that you are getting a phenomenal service from us. We work very hard to make it so. The minimum charge started early last year. All existing users (like you) were grandfathered in for an extended period while new users accepted the minimum fee. In that period we communicated the minimum free multiple times over email to all the users directly and in public comms (and on our pricing site). I am sorry you were still surprised. FWIW, I get how you are still surprised. I myself rarely read my email updates folder so, I would have prob missed it too. Notifications aside, in the time period when new users were charged the minimum fee and existing users were not, we built migration paths to the free tier for all those who can use it and beefed up its capacity to make sure that folks like you can use it, for free, for ever. If anything, I think we went above and beyond to make sure everyone was aware and taken care of. And, to answer your question, yes, it’s actually quite expensive to support such a large free user cohort. It’s not only compute and storage resources, it’s on-call rotations, migrations and upgrades, backups, community support (like the above) and more. Consolidating all free indexes to a single environment makes it a lot easier. Your time and creativity spent building with Pinecone and your feedback is what makes it great. Happy to connect 1:1 or have an open discussion here.