Vector DB free tiers, compared without the marketing gloss

The board

Asterisks on Astra's 0.5GB/0.5M mark the honest limitation of a credits model: Astra has no fixed free tier in the catalog's schema — its $25/month recurring credit can fund roughly ~5GB and ~1M operations at its published pay-as-you-go rates, but the catalog stores the mechanism (monthly recurring credit) rather than inventing a GB figure that the vendor never promised. The same honesty drives the zeros and dashes: Pinecone's value is 100k vectors (not a GB limit we could reliably convert), turbopuffer and clickhouse are credits-only (no fixed free GB to capture), and the self-hosted pgvector baselines on Hetzner (pgvector-hetzner, EUR pricing normalized at 1.08, surfaced in our VPS tool) show 0 free because you provision the VPS yourself — the compute is the cost. Where the catalog says zero, it means "no meaningful managed free allocation captured," not "we didn't look." Where it shows a GB or query count, that number came from the vendor's pricing page with a dated pricingCapturedAt stamp, surfaced in the vector-DB tool.

Three shapes of "free"

• Forever clusters: Qdrant and Zilliz lead this shape — a real (small) always-on deployment with 1 GB storage and 1M queries/month that does not expire. This is what most people actually want for a side project that needs a stable URL, persistent indexes, and no calendar-driven scramble to export vectors before the sandbox dies.
• Trials wearing a tier costume: Weaviate's sandbox dies in 14 days (100k vectors max, then it's gone); ClickHouse and Vespa hand you evaluation credits with a clock (ClickHouse: $300 for 30 days); turbopuffer's evaluation credits carry no fixed GB. Fine for prototyping and for measuring ingest speed, dangerous as an architecture assumption — if your demo week slips by a fortnight, your data slips with it.
• Credits-as-marketing: Zilliz's $100 starting credit and Astra's recurring $25/month are genuinely generous — Astra's monthly refresh effectively funds ~5GB/1M ops of usage permanently free at current rates — but they're discounts on paid plans, not islands of free service. Microsoft and AWS use the same pattern elsewhere: credits feel like free tiers until you multiply them by twelve and compare them to Qdrant's forever 1 GB that asks for no billing method at all.

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. The board exposes the gap: MongoDB Atlas's generous-sounding 512MB (0.5 GB) 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. Elastic is the inverse edge case: 50 GB retained storage free sounds enormous until you realize it is storage-only — there is no free query allowance to compare, because Elastic's consumption model charges query compute differently from vector-count plans. Cloudflare Vectorize is the honest challenger here: 200k vectors on the Workers free plan is a vector count, not a GB abstraction, and the tool keeps it that way rather than converting to a pretend GB figure that would drift with embedding dimension. Our tool surfaces both dimensions side by side in the vector comparison precisely because vendors don't advertise them in the same breath — and because a RAG prototype's cost at month three is almost always query-bound, not storage-bound.

Who should pick which shape

If you want a free forever home for a side project with real users, prioritize forever clusters: Qdrant Cloud (1 GB/1M) and Zilliz's starter cluster are the only rows that promise persistence with no calendar expiry. Qdrant's sandbox is the narrowest surprise because it includes dedicated RAM and vCPU so you can hold an index resident; Zilliz pairs the same size with a $100 credit that funds burst experimentation on top. If you want a frictionless Postgres story where vectors live beside your relational rows, Neon or Supabase both give 0.5 GB/0.5M but Neon adds 100 compute hours — useful if you already live in VPS land and can reason about a self-hosted pgvector on a Hetzner CX22 at €3.49 (~$3.77 normalized) as the ceiling that makes their free tiers attractive. If you want to evaluate index performance quickly and then decide, trials are fine: Weaviate's 14-day 100k sandbox, ClickHouse's 30-day $300 credit, and turbopuffer's evaluation credits let you burn at will, but calendar them — the worst failure mode we see is a team demoing into a sandbox that expires the morning of the demo.

• Check expiry before you invest in schema: "14-day sandbox" means your application architecture expires, not just your credits.
• Check query allowance before storage: 512MB means little if you get 50k queries and your RAG loop does 2k/day — you will be metered at 25 days.
• Check credit refresh: $25/month recurring (Astra) and $100 one-time (Zilliz) are not the same generosity — one replenishes, one disappears.
• Check self-host baseline: if a managed free tier is smaller than what a €3.49 Hetzner vCPU can host, ask whether you want managed convenience or raw GB per euro from our VPS dataset.
• Compare inside the vector DB tool with paid pricing alongside free limits — the free board alone cannot decide for you once your data grows past month one.

All figures were captured 2026-08-22 with per-row provenance (pricingUrl + pricingCapturedAt) in the catalog that backs the interactive comparison. When vendors change their tiers — as Pinecone did when Serverless introduced 100k vectors on the starter, and as Chroma, Weaviate, and Astra have adjusted credits — the recapture changes the data, not the story, and the article updates from the same source of truth rather than being defended.