Price checkMonthly
StarterFreeTeam$250/moEnterpriseCustom
See all 3 plans
Quick Answer
Last verified:
High confidence

Chroma costs Free to $250 per month as of May 2026, with 3 plans available including a free tier. Plans: Starter (free), and Team at $250/month. Enterprise pricing is available on request. The median contract is $250/year based on 81 verified purchases.

Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.

  • Free tier: Yes

Chroma offers 3 pricing tiers: Starter, Team, Enterprise. A free plan is available. Paid plans include Team at $250/month. The Team plan is growing teams needing slack support.

Compared to other vector databases software, Chroma is positioned at the budget-friendly price point.

  • Median contract: $250/yr from 81 purchases
  • 1 documented hidden costs beyond list price
Last verified: | Sources: 2 pricing pages and reviews

How much does Chroma cost?

Chroma offers 3 pricing plans, starting with a free tier and scaling to custom enterprise pricing. Plans include Starter (free), Team at $250/month, Enterprise (custom pricing).

Chroma Pricing Overview

Chroma has 3 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $250/month. The Starter plan is free and is best for solo developers and small teams. The Team plan costs $250/month, best for growing teams needing slack support. The Enterprise plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote and is designed for enterprises needing isolation and slas.

The median Chroma customer pays $250/year based on 81 verified purchases.

There are at least 1 documented hidden costs beyond Chroma's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

This pricing was last verified in April 24, 2026 from 2 independent sources.

Try Chroma Free
Chroma is an open-source vector database for AI applications, available as a self-hosted library or a fully managed serverless cloud service. The open-source version is free under Apache 2.0 and runs embedded in Python or as a standalone server. Chroma Cloud offers usage-based pricing with no monthly minimums: storage is $0.33/GiB/month, writes are $2.50/GiB, and queries are $0.0075/TiB queried.

How Chroma Pricing Compares

Compare Chroma pricing against top alternatives in Vector Databases.

Pinecone $0-$500/month Compare → Weaviate $0-$400/month Compare → Qdrant $0-$0/month Compare →
Live calculator

What does Chroma actually cost you?

Drag the slider. Pick a tier. Watch your projected spend update live.

Tier
Billing
Your projected cost$6.3Kper month · $250/seat × 25 seats
Year 1 license$75K12 months at this rate
At a glance

List price by tier (annualized, per seat)

Per-seat list price across Chroma's plans, annualized. Custom-priced tiers show a hatched bar.

StarterCustom
Team$3.0K/yr
EnterpriseCustom
Real-world benchmark

Buyers actually pay a median of $250/yr for Chroma contracts (Vendr deal flow, n=81). That's a contract total — the more seats, the more leverage to negotiate down.

All Chroma Plans & Pricing

Plan Monthly Annual Best For
View all features by plan (compare side-by-side)

Starter

  • $0/month + usage
  • $5 in free credits
  • Up to 10 databases
  • Up to 10 team members

Team

  • $250/month + usage
  • $100 credits/month
  • Up to 100 databases
  • Up to 30 team members
  • Slack support
  • Volume-based discounts

Enterprise

  • Dedicated support
  • Single-tenant clusters
  • SLAs
  • Configurable billing
Try Chroma Free
Compare Chroma with alternativesAdjust seats, lock a tier, add up to 2 more products side-by-side. Shareable URL.

Usage-Based Rates

Per-unit pricing for Chroma API usage.

Starter

Item Dimension Unit Rate
chroma-storage storage GiB month $0.330
chroma-query request TiB queried $0.00750
Model / SKU Unit Price
chroma-write GiB $2.50
chroma-network GiB egress $0.090
  • Unused credits do not expire on Starter

Team

Item Dimension Unit Rate
chroma-storage storage GiB month $0.330
chroma-query request TiB queried $0.00750
Model / SKU Unit Price
chroma-write GiB $2.50
chroma-network GiB egress $0.090
  • $100 included credits do not rollover

Compare Chroma vs Alternatives

Before committing to Chroma, compare pricing with these 3 alternatives in the same category.

VSPinecone
Free

Prototyping and small projects

Full comparison
VSWeaviate
Free

Testing and evaluation

Full comparison
VSQdrant
Free

Testing and prototypes

Full comparison

All Chroma alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Chroma

The median Chroma buyer pays $250/year based on 81 verified purchase transactions.

What companies actually pay $250/yr Median across 81 community cost mentions
Review scores
Top pricing complaints
Seen as a prototyping tool rather than a production-grade database by parts of the developer community
Source: Community cost mentions (Reddit, Hacker News) — aggregated from 81 distinct user reports. Indicative only — not contract-grade data.

Chroma Year 1 Total Cost by Company Size

Real deployment costs including licenses, implementation, training, and admin — not just the sticker price.

Self-Hosted Open Source ~$50/month (VPS costs only; software is $0) Year 1 total
VPS costs only; software is $0
Total ~$50/month (VPS costs only; software is $0)

Running Chroma Open Source on your own VPS; software is free, infrastructure cost is the only expense.

Developer Self-Hosted on VPS ~$50/month (VPS infrastructure; Open Source (Self-Hosted) plan is free) Year 1 total
VPS infrastructure; Open Source (Self-Hosted
Total ~$50/month (VPS infrastructure; Open Source (Self-Hosted) plan is free)

Individual developer or small team running Chroma open-source on a VPS for a RAG prototype or lightweight production deployment. Chroma itself is free; infrastructure is the only cost.

Team on Chroma Cloud $250 Year 1 total
Team plan
Total $250

Team using managed Chroma Cloud for collaborative vector search without managing infrastructure.

reddit/vectordatabase

How Chroma Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Chroma Free $250/month
LanceDB Free $1000/month
Milvus Free $155/month
MongoDB Atlas Vector Search Free $56.94/per hour
pgvector Custom Custom
Pinecone Free $500/month

Detailed pricing comparisons:

Browse all Vector Databases pricing →

1 Chroma Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Chroma has at least 1 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 1 hidden costs
  • Self-Hosting Server Infrastructure $50-$200
    medium 1 source
    Reddit "Alternatively, I'd say self host an open-source system like Qdrant, Weaviate, SemaDB, Milvus, Chroma etc on your own hardware. You can a relatively strong VPS for $50."
Tip

Ask your Chroma sales rep about these costs upfront. Getting them in writing before signing can save you from surprise charges later.

Full hidden costs breakdown →

Intelligence sourced from 1 independent sources
Reddit User discussions
Key claims include inline source attribution. Data verified against multiple independent sources. 2 source citations total.

Chroma Pricing FAQ

01 Is Chroma suitable for production use or just prototyping?

Chroma is widely used for prototyping and RAG development. Community discussion notes that 'Chroma is good for prototyping but i.e. neo4j can offer vector store and graph database in one,' suggesting some teams migrate to other vector stores for production workloads requiring graph capabilities or higher-scale managed infrastructure. The Open Source (Self-Hosted) plan supports any scale you can provision on your own hardware.

02 What does it cost to self-host Chroma?

The Open Source (Self-Hosted) plan is entirely free — you pay only for your own infrastructure. Community estimates suggest a reasonably capable VPS runs around $50/month, making Chroma one of the lowest-cost vector database options at small-to-medium scale.

03 Is Chroma free to use?

Yes. The Open Source (Self-Hosted) version of Chroma is completely free with no usage limits. Chroma Cloud offers a Starter plan with $5 in free credits, a Team plan at $250/month, and custom-priced Enterprise plans.

04 How does Chroma Cloud Team pricing compare to other managed vector databases?

Chroma Cloud's Team plan is $250/month. For context, community-reported pricing for comparable managed services (as of early 2025) includes Qdrant Cloud at approximately $250/month and Weaviate Cloud at approximately $400/month for 10 million 384-dimension vectors. These are competitor prices and may have changed.

Is this pricing incorrect? — we'll verify and update it.