The moment you cross 10M items or 100 QPS then scaling such a system becomes non-trivial. Combine that with some additional features a typical company may want

The moment you cross 10M items or 100 QPS then scaling such a system becomes non-trivial. Combine that with some additional features a typical company may want but won't find in the open-source libraries -- such as live index updates and metadata filtering -- and you have a good reason to look for managed solutions like Pinecone[0]. That's not a high threshold for any enterprise software company handling customer data or any consumer tech company with >10M users. Google, Elastic, and AWS thought so too because they all introduced (or planning to introduce, in the case of Elastic) vector search in their platforms. [0] https://www.pinecone.io https://www.pinecone.io