Pricing report · 2026-08-22
We priced 21 vector databases so you don't have to
Same workloads, same rules, every vendor. The spread between the cheapest and the "default" choice at production scale is 9× — and the most expensive option isn't even the best-known one.
What moved this month
Two vendors made August an unusually good month to re-price the market. Astra DB left the ranking entirely — DataStax's IBM acquisition pulled its public serverless rates, so instead of quoting numbers we can no longer verify, we withdrew it until a live-verifiable offer exists. And Cloudflare Vectorize's billing model changed: it now bills per queried and stored vector dimension, not per query — a rate structure our engine models as included allowances only, because a flat per-query average would understate real bills by an order of magnitude. Both moves are documented in the catalog, not footnoted away.
Why another comparison
Most vector-database comparisons are feature matrices copied from marketing pages. Almost none of them tell you what a workload will actually cost, because pricing pages are full of capacity units (search units, OCUs, VCUs, nodes), regional multipliers, and free tiers that quietly expire.
We maintain a live comparison tool backed by a catalog of 21 vendors whose rates are hand-captured from official pricing pages and public APIs — each row carries a provenance date (20 of them stamped). This report runs all of them through three fixed benchmark workloads and reports USD-normalized monthly totals, EU region. Withdrawn from ranking: DataStax Astra DB Vector(DataStax's IBM acquisition pulled its serverless rates) — public pricing became unverifiable, so we refuse to quote numbers we cannot check. A vendor returns the moment a live-verifiable offer is captured.
The headline finding
At the mid-scale workload (1M vectors, 1M queries/month), prices range from $5.00/mo to $350.43/mo across the 19 quotable vendors. That's not a rounding difference — it's two different billing philosophies colliding:
- Metered serverless (Pinecone, Turbopuffer, Cloudflare Vectorize) bills per unit consumed, so small workloads stay near zero.
- Capacity floors (Azure AI Search search-units, AWS OpenSearch Serverless OCUs, Vertex AI nodes, Elasticsearch VCUs) bill for provisioned compute whether you query it or not.
The capacity-billed vendors aren't bad value — they're engineered for steady enterprise traffic where an SLA-backed floor is fine. But pointing a 100k-vector side project at any of them means paying $65.75–$350.42/month for what costs $0 elsewhere. At mid-scale, the floors look like this: Elasticsearch Serverless $65.78, Vertex AI Vector Search $68.48, Azure AI Search $73.73, AWS OpenSearch Serverless $350.43.
The numbers
RAG prototype
100,000 vectors · 1536-dim fp32 · 0.2M queries/mo
Mid-scale production
1,000,000 vectors · 768-dim int8 · 1M queries/mo
Large RAG
5,000,000 vectors · 768-dim int8 · 10M queries/mo
Three takeaways
- Free tiers are real now. Qdrant Cloud Managed and Zilliz Cloud (Managed Milvus) land at $0 on the prototype workload. For a hobby RAG project there is no reason to pay anything in 2026.
- The "default" choice carries a premium that grows with scale. Pinecone Serverless runs 1.8× the cheapest option at mid-scale (9× at the large workload, $85.43 vs $9.15). Sometimes the managed convenience is worth it — but it should be a decision, not a default.
- Self-hosting still anchors the market. pgvector on a $9.15 Hetzner VPS holds a top-3 spot at both mid-scale ($9.15/mo) and large workloads ($9.15/mo) — the reason every managed vendor has to justify its margin.
Method & honesty notes
- Rates captured from official pricing pages / public APIs; capture date recorded per vendor row (
pricingCapturedAt). Azure figures cross-checked against Microsoft's Retail Prices API; Vertex node rates against Google's published us-central1 table. - Vendors that bill capacity rather than queries carry engineering-estimate query allowances — documented in their catalog rows, not hidden.
- EUR-denominated vendors are converted at the tool's fixed FX rate before ranking.
- Region-filtered ranking: US-only vendors (e.g. Chroma Cloud) are excluded from these EU-workload tables, which is why the count reads fewer than 21 where applicable.
- Prices change. The compare tool always reflects the current catalog; this article is a snapshot dated 2026-08-22.