Chroma Pricing

freemiumopen source · Apache 2.0last verified August 26, 2026official site ↗

Plan	Price	Notes
Open Sourceofficial source ↗	$0checked 2026-08-26	Apache 2.0 license, run locally or in Docker/Kubernetes, unlimited vectors and collections
Starter (Cloud)official source ↗	$0checked 2026-08-26	$5 in free monthly credits included, pay-as-you-go usage for writes, storage, and queries, serverless vector search
Team (Cloud)official source ↗	USD 250/monthchecked 2026-08-26	$100 monthly usage credit included, higher database and member limits, SOC II compliance
Enterprise (Cloud)official source ↗	Customchecked 2026-08-26	Single-tenant clusters, BYOC deployment, dedicated support, custom SLAs

structured from cited official pricing sources: “Chroma is an open-source AI vector database under Apache 2.0. Chroma Cloud offers a serverless Starter tier ($0/month with $5 free credits + usage-based billing), a Team plan at $250/month ($100 credit, SOC II, expanded limits), and custom Enterprise plans for BYOC and dedicated clusters.”

Self-hosting cost

Chroma is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage. Any hosted, managed, or API plans remain separately priced.

Free & cheaper Databases & ORMs

same category, free plan or open-source license

UpstashFreemium serverless data platform (Redis, Kafka, Vector, QStash). Free tier includes daily command/request quotas (10k commands/day for Redis/Kafka/Vector, 500 messages/day for QStash at $0/mo). Pay-as-you-go charges per request ($0.20-$0.40 per 100k requests) and storage ($0.25/GB/mo) with scale-to-zero idle compute. Pro fixed plans start at $280/mo with dedicated throughput and 99.99% SLA, and Enterprise plans provide dedicated VPC peering and custom compliance.TurboVecopen sourceFree and open source under the MIT License. Distributed as a Rust crate and Python package with zero software licensing fees.Neonopen sourceNeon provides a serverless PostgreSQL database with scale-to-zero capabilities. The Free tier includes 100 Compute Unit (CU) hours and 0.5 GB storage per month across up to 100 projects. Paid usage is consumption-based with no minimum monthly platform fee: Launch bills at $0.106/CU-hour and Scale at $0.222/CU-hour with $0.35/GB-month storage.SPTAGopen sourceFree and open source under the MIT License. Users provide their own hardware and compute infrastructure for distributed serving and index compilation.

Chroma overview →alternatives →review: 84/100 →

FAQ

How much does Chroma cost?

Chroma is an open-source AI vector database under Apache 2.0. Chroma Cloud offers a serverless Starter tier ($0/month with $5 free credits + usage-based billing), a Team plan at $250/month ($100 credit, SOC II, expanded limits), and custom Enterprise plans for BYOC and dedicated clusters. Paid pricing starts at $250/month.

Does Chroma have a free plan?

Yes — Chroma has a free plan alongside its paid tiers.

Can you self-host Chroma for free?

What are free or cheaper Chroma alternatives?

Upstash, TurboVec, Neon are in the same category with a free plan or open-source license.

pricing is editorial catalog data (last verified August 26, 2026) — vendors change plans; confirm on the official site before you buy. Reuse this data under CC-BY 4.0 via /data.