Vector DB free tiers, compared without the marketing gloss
Every vector database has a free tier, and every free tier is free in a different direction. One gives you gigabytes but meters queries; another gives you a million queries but half a gigabyte; a third gives you $300 of credits that evaporate in a month. Since your side project will live inside whichever box you pick until it outgrows it, the shape of the box matters more than its label. Our vector DB comparison captures the actual numeric limits for all 21 providers in our catalog — captured 2026-08-22 from vendor pricing pages, with per-row provenance. Here they are, un-glossed.
The board
| Provider | Free storage | Free queries/mo | The fine print |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qdrant Cloud | 1 GB | 1M | Free-forever cluster: 1GB RAM / 0.5 vCPU / 4GB storage |
| Zilliz Cloud | 1 GB | 1M | $100 starting credit + free starter cluster |
| Chroma Cloud | 0.5 GB | 0.5M | Free community tier with 500MB storage |
| Astra DB (DataStax) | 0.5 GB | 0.5M | $25 monthly recurring credit (~5GB/1M ops effective) |
| Supabase (pgvector) | 0.5 GB | 0.5M | 500MB database storage, shared CPU |
| Neon (pgvector) | 0.5 GB | 0.5M | 0.5GB storage + 100 compute hours/month |
| MongoDB Atlas | 0.5 GB | 0.05M | M0 free shared cluster, 512MB, vector indexing included |
| Weaviate Cloud | 0.5 GB | 0.1M | 14-day sandbox only — up to 100k vectors, then it's gone |
| Elastic Cloud | 50 GB retained | — | Serverless vector profiles include 50GB retained storage free |
| Cloudflare Vectorize | 0.05 GB | 0.03M | 200k vectors included on the workers free plan |
| Azure AI Search | 0.05 GB | 0.1M | Free F tier: 50MB, 3 indexes, explicitly no SLA |
| Redis Cloud | 0.03 GB | 0.1M | 30MB free instance with Vector Search module |
| Pinecone Serverless | — | — | Starter plan on shared infrastructure, up to 100k vectors, 1 index |
| turbopuffer | — | — | Evaluation credits at signup; paid Launch plan starts $16/mo |
| ClickHouse Cloud | — | — | 30-day $300 trial credits — a trial, not a tier |
| Vespa Cloud | — | — | Evaluation credits via console |
Three shapes of "free"
- Forever clusters: Qdrant and Zilliz lead this shape — a real (small) always-on deployment. This is what most people actually want for a side project.
- Trials wearing a tier costume: Weaviate's sandbox dies in 14 days; ClickHouse and Vespa hand you evaluation credits with a clock. Fine for prototyping, dangerous as an architecture assumption.
- Credits-as-marketing: Zilliz's $100 and Astra's recurring $25/month credit are genuinely generous — Astra's monthly refresh effectively makes ~5GB/1M-ops usage permanently free — but they're discounts on paid plans, not islands of free service.
The dimension almost nobody compares
Storage is the headline number vendors advertise, but queries are where free tiers actually run out for most workloads. A retrieval-augmented app that embeds once and searches constantly burns query allowance thousands of times faster than storage. MongoDB Atlas's generous-sounding 512MB comes with just 0.05M free query operations monthly — fifty thousand. Qdrant's free cluster carries a full million. Same "free tier" label, twenty-fold difference in the resource your application hammers all day. Our tool surfaces both dimensions side by side precisely because vendors don't advertise them in the same breath.
The interactive version of this table — sortable by any captured dimension, with paid pricing alongside — lives in the vector DB comparison tool. All figures captured 2026-08-22; when vendors change their tiers, the recapture changes the data, not the story.