Buying Guide · 100,000 Vectors

Cheapest Vector DB for 100k-Vector RAG Prototypes

🏆 Best overall: Chroma Cloud Managed

Prototyping needs <500k vectors, 1536-dim (OpenAI 3-small), <0.5M queries. Optimize for free tier and zero-ops, not throughput.

Cheapest Vector Databases for this Scale

#1 Qdrant Cloud Managed $0.00/mo Visit →

#2 Zilliz Cloud (Managed Milvus) $0.00/mo Visit →

#3 DataStax Astra DB Vector $0.27/mo Visit →

#4 Pinecone Serverless $2.17/mo Visit →

#5 Cloudflare Vectorize $5.00/mo Visit →

#6 pgvector on Hetzner VPS (Self-Hosted) $8.48/mo Visit →

#7 Redis Cloud (Vector Search) $14.40/mo Visit →

#8 Turbopuffer $16.08/mo Visit →