Price checkMonthly
Open Source (Self-Hosted)FreeZilliz Cloud FreeFreeZilliz Cloud Standard$99/mo
See all 5 plans
Quick Answer
Last verified:
High confidence

Milvus costs Free to $155 per month as of May 2026, with 5 plans available including a free tier. Plans: Open Source (Self-Hosted) (free), Zilliz Cloud Free (free), Zilliz Cloud Standard at $99/month, and Zilliz Cloud Enterprise at $155/month. Enterprise pricing is available on request. The median contract is $450/year based on 8 verified purchases.

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

  • Free tier: Yes

Milvus offers 5 pricing tiers: Open Source (Self-Hosted), Zilliz Cloud Free, Zilliz Cloud Standard, Zilliz Cloud Enterprise, Zilliz Cloud Business Critical. A free plan is available. Paid plans include Zilliz Cloud Standard at $99/month, Zilliz Cloud Enterprise at $155/month. The Zilliz Cloud Free plan is learning and personal projects.

Compared to other vector databases software, Milvus is positioned at the mid-market price point.

  • Median contract: $450/yr from 8 purchases
  • 3 documented hidden costs beyond list price
Last verified: | Sources: 2 pricing pages and reviews

How much does Milvus cost?

Milvus offers 5 pricing plans, starting with a free tier and scaling to custom enterprise pricing. Plans include Open Source (Self-Hosted) (free), Zilliz Cloud Free (free), Zilliz Cloud Standard at $99/month, Zilliz Cloud Enterprise at $155/month, Zilliz Cloud Business Critical (custom pricing).

Milvus Pricing Overview

Milvus has 5 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $155/month. The Open Source (Self-Hosted) plan is free and is best for teams with devops capacity who want full control and no cloud costs. The Zilliz Cloud Free plan is free and is best for learning and personal projects. The Zilliz Cloud Standard plan costs $99/month, best for prototypes, testing environments, and non-critical workloads. The Zilliz Cloud Enterprise plan costs $155/month, best for production applications requiring enterprise-grade reliability. The Zilliz Cloud Business Critical plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote and is designed for healthcare, finance, and other highly regulated mission-critical systems.

The median Milvus customer pays $450/year based on 8 verified purchases.

There are at least 3 documented hidden costs beyond Milvus's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

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

Try Milvus Free
Milvus is an open-source, cloud-native vector database built for scalable AI applications, available free under Apache 2.0 for self-hosting or as a fully managed service through Zilliz Cloud. The Zilliz Cloud free tier includes 5 GB storage and 2.5M vCUs/month. Serverless clusters charge $4/million vCUs and $0.04/GB/month storage with no minimum. Dedicated clusters start at approximately $99/month for production workloads.

How Milvus Pricing Compares

Compare Milvus pricing against top alternatives in Vector Databases.

Zilliz $0-$155/mo Compare → LanceDB $0-$1000/mo Compare → Pinecone $0-$500/mo Compare →
Live calculator

What does Milvus actually cost you?

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

Tier
Billing
Your projected cost$2.5Kper month · $99/seat × 25 seats
Year 1 license$30K12 months at this rate
At a glance

List price by tier (annualized, per seat)

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

Open Source (Self-Hosted)Custom
Zilliz Cloud FreeCustom
Zilliz Cloud Standard$1.2K/yr
Zilliz Cloud Enterprise$1.9K/yr
Zilliz Cloud Business CriticalCustom
Real-world benchmark

Buyers actually pay a median of $450/yr for Milvus contracts (Vendr deal flow, n=8). That's a contract total — the more seats, the more leverage to negotiate down.

All Milvus Plans & Pricing

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

Open Source (Self-Hosted)

  • Free forever
  • Apache 2.0 license
  • Full feature set
  • Community support
  • Docker / Kubernetes deployment

Zilliz Cloud Free

  • 5 GB storage included
  • 2.5M vCUs/month included
  • Up to 5 collections
  • Serverless clusters
  • Google Cloud deployment

Zilliz Cloud Standard

  • Serverless from $0/month or Dedicated from $99/month
  • Fully managed vector databases with core APIs
  • Backup, restore, and basic monitoring
  • Built-in encryption for data in transit and at rest
  • Manual scaling to 32 CUs
  • AWS and Google Cloud deployment

Zilliz Cloud Enterprise

  • 99.95% uptime SLA
  • Audit logs, SSO (SAML 2.0), granular RBAC
  • Multi-replica and elastic scaling
  • Private endpoint and VPC peering
  • Enterprise support included
  • Configurable auto-scaling up to 256+ CUs
  • AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure deployment

Zilliz Cloud Business Critical

  • 99.99% uptime SLA with multi-replica
  • Global cluster with high availability and disaster recovery
  • CMEK and full-path in-transit encryption
  • HIPAA-eligible with enhanced data privacy
  • Priority support and rapid incident response
  • Cross-region backup and continuous data protection
Try Milvus Free
Compare Milvus with alternativesAdjust seats, lock a tier, add up to 2 more products side-by-side. Shareable URL.

Compare Milvus vs Alternatives

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

VSZilliz
Free

Production AI applications requiring enterprise-grade reliability

Full comparison
VSLanceDB
Free

Local development, edge deployments, and self-hosted production

Full comparison
VSPinecone
Free

Production workloads on serverless

Full comparison

All Milvus alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Milvus

The median Milvus buyer pays $450/year based on 8 verified purchase transactions.

What companies actually pay $450/yr Median across 8 community cost mentions
Review scores
Top pricing complaints
vCU pricing model is opaque and difficult to estimate costs before running actual workloadsManaged cloud costs escalate sharply at scale — $23k/month at 1 billion vectors
Source: Community cost mentions (Reddit, Hacker News) — aggregated from 8 distinct user reports. Indicative only — not contract-grade data.

Milvus Year 1 Total Cost by Company Size

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

Developer / Prototype (Self-Hosted on VPS) ~$50/month (VPS only) Year 1 total
VPS only
Total ~$50/month (VPS only)

Running open-source Milvus on a basic VPS for development, testing, or low-traffic production. No Zilliz license cost — only infrastructure.

Small Production (Zilliz Cloud Free + Standard) $0 Year 1 total

Starting on the Zilliz Cloud Free tier (5 GB, 2.5M vCUs/month, 5 collections) and upgrading to Zilliz Cloud Standard once those limits are hit.

Mid-Scale Production (Self-Hosted Milvus) ~$400/month (infrastructure only) Year 1 total
infrastructure only
Total ~$400/month (infrastructure only)

Self-hosting Milvus on dedicated cloud infrastructure for workloads requiring tens of millions of vectors, avoiding managed cloud costs.

Mid-Scale Production (Zilliz Cloud, ~100M vectors, 384 dims) $1,400 Year 1 total

Capacity-optimized Zilliz Cloud deployment with 12-16 CUs for approximately 100 million vectors at 384 dimensions, targeting sub-100ms latency.

Internet Scale (Zilliz Cloud, 1B vectors) ~$23,000/month Year 1 total

Zilliz Cloud deployment for 1 billion vectors at scale, typically requiring Enterprise or Business Critical tier with cloud instance upsells.

Reddit (r/vectordatabase, 2025-03-27)

How Milvus Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Milvus Free $155/month
Chroma Free $250/month
LanceDB Free $1000/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 →

3 Milvus Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Milvus has at least 3 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 3 hidden costs
  • Self-Hosting Infrastructure Costs $50-$400/month
    medium 2 sources
    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.."
    Reddit "It may be possible to get the cost down to around $400 per month by self-hosting an open-source solution like Milvus."
  • Opaque vCU Pricing Makes Cost Forecasting Difficult $99-$1,800/month
    medium 2 sources
    Reddit "Zilliz: difficult to estate from vCU units they use"
    Reddit "The estimated cost for this type of deployment is around $1,400-$1,800 per month."
  • Extreme Scale Costs on Zilliz Cloud $23,000/month
    high 1 source
    Reddit "Zilliz is upselling AWS instances and for 1B it seems it will be 23k$ a month."
Tip

Ask your Milvus 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. 11 source citations total.

How to Negotiate Milvus Pricing

Milvus contracts are negotiable. These 5 tactics are sourced from real buyer experiences and procurement specialists.

Negotiation Playbook 5 tactics
Claim the $400 New Account Credit high success

Zilliz Cloud offers $400 in free credits for new accounts. Use this period to run realistic workloads and measure your actual vCU consumption before committing to a paid tier, giving you concrete data for any pricing discussion.

Reddit (r/SaaS, 2023-05-06)
Benchmark on Self-Hosted Milvus First high success

Because Milvus open source uses the same codebase as Zilliz Cloud, you can run production-representative workloads on a self-hosted instance to measure vCU requirements before signing a Zilliz contract. This data gives you negotiating leverage and prevents over-provisioning.

Reddit (r/vectordatabase, 2024-01-09)
Use Competitor Pricing Calculators as Anchors medium success

Qdrant and Weaviate publish transparent pricing calculators. At 10 million vectors with 384 dimensions, Qdrant prices at $205/month and Weaviate at $369/month. Reference these figures when negotiating Zilliz Cloud Enterprise or Business Critical pricing to establish a market anchor.

Reddit (r/vectordatabase, 2025-03-27)
Apply Quantization to Reduce vCU Consumption medium success

Binary or SQ8 quantization reduces vector memory footprint, which directly lowers vCU usage on Zilliz Cloud. If your use case tolerates a modest accuracy reduction, quantization can meaningfully reduce monthly bills before negotiating a tier.

Reddit (r/vectordatabase, 2024-04-15)
Negotiate Capacity-Optimized vs Performance-Optimized Trade-off medium success

Zilliz Cloud offers both capacity-optimized and performance-optimized deployment modes. If your latency requirement is above 100ms, capacity-optimized deployments use fewer CUs for the same data volume. Explicitly requesting capacity-optimized mode can reduce costs from $1,400-$1,800/month to lower ranges for equivalent datasets.

Reddit (r/vectordatabase, 2024-04-15)
High success Medium Low / difficult

Full negotiation guide →

Milvus Pricing FAQ

01 Is Milvus free to use?

Yes — in two ways. The Open Source (Self-Hosted) tier is completely free with no storage or query limits (you pay only for your own server infrastructure). The Zilliz Cloud Free tier is also a permanent free tier capped at 5 GB storage, 2.5M vCUs/month, and up to 5 collections.

02 What is the difference between Milvus open source and Zilliz Cloud?

Milvus is an open-source vector database you self-host for free. Zilliz Cloud is the fully managed cloud service built on the same Milvus codebase — code written for open-source Milvus works on Zilliz Cloud without modification. Zilliz Cloud removes the operational burden of managing the cluster but adds usage-based costs starting at $99/month on the Zilliz Cloud Standard plan.

03 How much does Zilliz Cloud cost for large-scale deployments?

Costs scale significantly with vector count and query load. Community estimates put capacity-optimized Zilliz Cloud deployments for ~100 million vectors (384 dimensions) at $1,400–$1,800/month. At 1 billion vectors, costs can reach approximately $23,000/month. Zilliz Cloud Standard starts at $99/month and Zilliz Cloud Enterprise at $155/month, with Zilliz Cloud Business Critical available at custom pricing.

04 How does Zilliz Cloud's vCU pricing work?

Zilliz Cloud charges based on virtual Compute Units (vCUs) consumed. vCU usage depends on your vector dimensions, total record count, index type, and query frequency. Community users note this is difficult to estimate without running actual workloads — the free tier includes 2.5M vCUs/month, and Zilliz offers $400 in new-account credits to help you measure consumption before committing.

05 Is it cheaper to self-host Milvus or use Zilliz Cloud?

For small to mid-scale workloads, self-hosting Milvus typically costs $50–$400/month in server infrastructure versus $1,400–$1,800/month for comparable workloads on Zilliz Cloud. The trade-off is operational complexity — self-hosting requires managing deployment, upgrades, and availability yourself. Zilliz Cloud's free tier and $400 new-account credit let you evaluate before committing to a paid plan.

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