Buying Guide · 100,000 Vectors

Cheapest Vector DB for 100k-Vector RAG Prototypes

🏆 Best overall: Qdrant Cloud Managed· runner-up: Zilliz Cloud (Managed Milvus)

Verified 2026-08-31

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 Pinecone Serverless $2.17/mo Visit ↗

#4 Cloudflare Vectorize $5.00/mo Visit ↗

#5 pgvector on Hetzner VPS (Self-Hosted) $9.15/mo Visit ↗

#6 Redis Cloud (Vector Search) $14.40/mo Visit ↗

#7 Turbopuffer $16.08/mo Visit ↗

#8 Neon Serverless Postgres (pgvector) $19.00/mo Visit ↗