verifier.org

Chroma

the best developer experience, and honest per-unit pricing

$0 base with usage-based billing; $0.33 per GiB-month storage#prototypes#small-to-mid-production-

pip install and go, with genuinely transparent pricing — the right call up to a few million vectors and the wrong one well before a hundred.

chroma is the easiest thing here to start with by a wide margin, which is why it dominates tutorials and prototypes. that matters more than it sounds: most rag projects die from friction rather than from scaling limits.

the pricing is unusually honest — storage, writes, queries and returned data each priced per unit with no minimum base fee on the entry tier. after wrestling with vendors who route you to a sales form, that clarity is worth something.

the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.

pricing
$0 base with usage-based billing; $0.33 per GiB-month storage
our verdict

pip install and go, with genuinely transparent pricing — the right call up to a few million vectors and the wrong one well before a hundred.

we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.

more vector databases

Cloudflare Vectorize

vector index that runs on workers, beside cloudflare's own inference

#serverless#workers

Marqo

search engine that generates and stores its own embeddings for you

#embeddings-included

Upstash Vector

serverless vector database billed per request, with an http api

#serverless#http-api

pgvector

we checked thisfree — PostgreSQL License

the correct default for most teams, and it quietly got good

#almost-everyone-start-he#migrate-on-a-measured-th#not-a-vendor-s-table