Cloud Cost Crunch: $6 Server Beats AI Index at a Fraction of the Price

Six months ago I moved my RAG pipeline from Pinecone to self-hosted Qdrant. My vector search bill went from $210/month to $6.50/month. Same latency. Same recall. Here's exactly how. 5.2 million vectors (1536-dim, OpenAI embeddings) On Pinecone Serverless, this cost me roughly $210/month — storage pl