Price checkPer 1 hour
Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit$0.001369863/1 hour/moGrounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data$2.5/1 hour/moCheck Grounding API pricing$0.00075/1 hour/mo
See all 5 plans

All Google Vertex AI Search Plans & Pricing

Plan Monthly Annual Best For
Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit Not published Not specified
Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data Not published Not specified
Check Grounding API pricing Not published Not specified
Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor Not published Not specified
Ranking API pricing - Rank documents Not published Not specified
View all features by plan (compare side-by-side)

Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit

Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data

Check Grounding API pricing

Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor

Ranking API pricing - Rank documents

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Billing
Your projected cost$0.034per month · $0.001369863/unit × 25units
Year 1 license$0.41112 months at this rate
At a glance

List price by tier (annualized, per unit)

Per-unit list price across Google Vertex AI Search's plans, annualized. Custom-priced tiers show a hatched bar.

Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit$0.016/yr
Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data$30/yr
Check Grounding API pricing$0.009/yr
Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor$18/yr
Ranking API pricing - Rank documents$12/yr
Quick Answer
Last verified:
High confidence

Google Vertex AI Search costs $0.00 to $2.50 per 1 hour as of August 2026, with 5 plans available. Plans: Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit at $0.001369863/1 hour, Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data at $2.5/1 hour, Check Grounding API pricing at $0.00075/1 hour, Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor at $1.5/1 hour, and Ranking API pricing - Rank documents at $1/1 hour. Pricing depends on your chosen tier, contract length, and negotiated discounts.

Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.

  • Free tier: No free tier available

Google Vertex AI Search offers 5 pricing tiers: Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit, Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data, Check Grounding API pricing, Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor, Ranking API pricing - Rank documents. Paid plans include Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit at $0.001369863/1 hour, Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data at $2.5/1,000 count, Check Grounding API pricing at $0.00075/1,000 count.

Compared to other rag pipelines & knowledge base infra software, Google Vertex AI Search is positioned at the budget-friendly price point.

  • 25 documented hidden costs beyond list price
  • G2 rating: 3.9 out of 5 from 13 reviews (as of Jul 2026)
Last verified: | Sources: 1 pricing pages and reviews

How much does Google Vertex AI Search cost?

Google Vertex AI Search pricing ranges from $0.00 to $2.50/1 hour across 5 plans. Plans include Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit at $0.00/1 hour, Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data at $2.50/1 hour, Check Grounding API pricing at $0.00/1 hour, Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor at $1.50/1 hour, Ranking API pricing - Rank documents at $1/1 hour.

Google Vertex AI Search Pricing Overview

Google Vertex AI Search has 5 pricing plans ranging from $0.00 to $2.50/1 hour. The Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit plan costs $0.00/1 hour. The Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data plan costs $2.50/1 hour. The Check Grounding API pricing plan costs $0.00/1 hour. The Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor plan costs $1.50/1 hour. The Ranking API pricing - Rank documents plan costs $1/1 hour.

There are at least 25 documented hidden costs beyond Google Vertex AI Search's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

This pricing was last verified in June 14, 2026 from 1 independent source.

See Google Vertex AI Search Plans

Google Vertex AI Search offers several pricing tiers for its various features. Pricing is based on usage, with different units for different services.

The available plans include Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit, Grounded Generation API, Check Grounding API, Document AI feature pricing, and Ranking API.

How Google Vertex AI Search Pricing Compares

Compare Google Vertex AI Search pricing against top alternatives in RAG Pipelines & Knowledge Base Infra.

DocugamiKB $300-$2500/mo View pricing → Mixpeek $0-$99/month View pricing → Cohere Compass $2500-$6500/instance View pricing →

Compare Google Vertex AI Search vs Alternatives

Before committing to Google Vertex AI Search, compare pricing with these 3 alternatives in the same category.

VSDocugamiKB
From $300/mo

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VSMixpeek
Free

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VSCohere Compass
From $2500/instance

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All Google Vertex AI Search alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Google Vertex AI Search

Review scores
TrustRadius 8.6out of 10 (39)
G2 3.9out of 5 (13)
Third-party review aggregates, as of Jul 2026
Top pricing complaints
Pricing and Cost TransparencyLearning Curve and ComplexityDebugging and TransparencyData Grounding and Connectors

How Google Vertex AI Search Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Google Vertex AI Search $0.00075/1 hour $2.5/1 hour
DocugamiKB $300/mo $2500/mo
Mixpeek Free $99/month
Cohere Compass $2500/instance $6500/instance
LlamaIndex Free $500/month
Chunkr $375/mo $2000/mo

Browse all RAG Pipelines & Knowledge Base Infra pricing →

25 Google Vertex AI Search Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Google Vertex AI Search has at least 25 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 25 hidden costs
  • Engineering Time for RAG Pipeline $50,000 to $100,000 annually
    high 1 source
    industry "For a typical mid-market deployment with 100,000 documents, the traditional RAG stack can incur an additional one to two engineers spending 20-30% of their time maintaining the pipeline, translating to $50,000 to $100,000 annually in direct costs,..."
  • Data Quality and Preparation
    medium 1 source
    industry "Retrieval optimization also requires continuous effort, including tuning parameters, adjusting chunking strategies, and experimenting with hybrid search, all consuming engineering hours not always in initial estimates"
  • Idle Endpoints $332.64
    medium 1 source
    industry "For instance, three experimental models on e2-standard-4 endpoints ($0.154/hour each) left running for 30 days can result in $332.64 in unused endpoint fees"
  • Grounding Surcharges $14 per 1,000 queries (Gemini 3), $35 per 1,000 queries (Gemini 2.x), $45 per 1,000 grounded prompts (Web Grounding), $25 per 1,000 grounded prompts (Google Maps)
    high 1 source
    industry "Web Grounding for Enterprise is $45 per 1,000 grounded prompts, and Google Maps grounding is $25 per 1,000 grounded prompts"
  • Data Transfer (Egress) Fees $0.12/GB to most destinations, $0.23/GB to China/Australia
    medium 1 source
    industry "Large batch prediction jobs or frequent model downloads can lead to unexpected charges"
  • Storage Costs $0.020/GB-month (Standard Cloud Storage), $0.170/GB-month (SSD-backed storage), $700-$800/month (moderately sized vector index)
    medium 1 source
    industry "Standard Cloud Storage costs $0.020/GB-month, while SSD-backed storage is $0.170/GB-month"
  • Vertex AI Management Fees $0.44 per hour
    low 1 source
    industry "For example, an NVIDIA A100 GPU might cost $2.93 per hour for compute plus an additional $0.44 per hour Vertex management fee, totaling $3.37 per hour"
  • Initial Setup Complexity
    medium 1 source
    industry "Complexity and "Setup Tax": For teams new to Google Cloud, the initial setup, including IAM configuration, API enablement, service account setup, and networking, can take one to three days"
  • Vertex AI Vector Search $700-$800 per month, $3 per GiB
    high 1 source
    industry "A moderately sized index with three replicas can cost approximately $700-$800 per month."
  • Vertex AI RAG Engine Orchestration
    medium 1 source
    industry "Billing includes separate charges for corpus storage, retrieval queries, and underlying model calls."
  • Embedding Generation
    medium 1 source
    industry "Embedding Generation: The RAG Engine orchestrates embedding generation, and the project is billed for the associated embedding model costs."
  • Data Indexing and Retrieval (Spanner)
    medium 1 source
    industry "Data Indexing and Retrieval: The RAG Engine uses Spanner as a backend for these operations, incurring associated Spanner billing charges."
  • LLM Parsing and Reranking
    medium 1 source
    industry "LLM Parsing and Reranking: If an LLM parser is used for data transformation or an LLM reranker for retrieval results, the project is billed for the LLM model costs directly."
  • Foundation Model (LLM) Token Consumption $1.25 per million input tokens, $10.00 per million output tokens
    high 1 source
    industry "For example, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (for ≤200K context) and $10.00 per million output tokens."
  • Variable Token Consumption Costs
    high 1 source
    industry "Usage-Based Pricing Complexity: Vertex AI's pricing is usage-based, with costs varying significantly depending on the specific services and models used, including training, prediction, pipelines, and generative AI features."
  • Compute Resource Billing
    medium 1 source
    industry "Usage-Based Pricing Complexity: Vertex AI's pricing is usage-based, with costs varying significantly depending on the specific services and models used, including training, prediction, pipelines, and generative AI features."
  • Component-based pricing (Vertex AI Search) $400-$600 per month
    high 1 source
    industry "An internal knowledge base handling 100,000 queries per month could incur $400-$600 in search costs alone."
  • Generative AI Model Tokens (Gemini 2.5 Pro)
    critical 1 source
    industry "For example, Gemini 2.5 Pro costs $1.25 per million input tokens (up to 200K context) and $10.00 per million output tokens, with larger context windows (200K-1M tokens) doubling these rates."
  • Query-Based Pricing $400-$600 per month
    high 1 source
    industry "Advanced Generative Answers add an additional $4.00 per 1,000 user input queries."
  • Vector Search Infrastructure $700-$800 per month
    medium 1 source
    industry "An internal knowledge base handling 100,000 queries per month could incur $400-$600 in search costs alone."
  • RAG Engine Components
    medium 1 source
    industry "RAG Engine Components: The Vertex AI RAG Engine, which orchestrates end-to-end RAG, includes separate charges for corpus storage, retrieval queries, and the underlying model calls."
  • Search Queries $400-$600 per month
    low 1 source
    industry "An internal knowledge base handling 100,000 queries per month could incur $400-$600 in search costs alone."
  • Agent Engine Runtime
    low 1 source
    industry "Agent Engine Runtime: For AI agents, the runtime is billed at $0.0864 per vCPU-hour."
  • Session and Memory Bank
    low 1 source
    industry "Session and Memory Bank: Charges are $0.25 per 1,000 events."
  • Token Inflation
    high 1 source
    industry "Token Inflation: Complex agentic workflows can lead to output costs outpacing input by 10-15x, instead of the expected 4-6x, due to reasoning tokens billed as output."
Tip

Ask your Google Vertex AI Search sales rep about these costs upfront. Getting them in writing before signing can save you from surprise charges later.

Full hidden costs breakdown →

Intelligence sourced from 3 independent sources
industry TrustRadius Enterprise reviews G2 B2B reviews
Key claims include inline source attribution. Data verified against multiple independent sources. 25 source citations total.

Google Vertex AI Search Pricing FAQ

01 What is the price for Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit?

The Agent Search - Configurable Pricing - Core Subscription - Storage Unit is priced at $0.001369863 per 1 hour.

02 What is the price for the Grounded Generation API?

The Grounded Generation API - Grounded Generation for grounding on your own retrieved data is priced at $2.5 per 1,000 count.

03 What is the price for the Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor?

The Document AI feature pricing - Digitize text - OCR processor is priced at $1.5 per 1,000 count.

Is this pricing incorrect? — we'll verify and update it.