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Free TrialFreeFlex$45/moPremium$400/mo
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Weaviate costs Free to $400 per month as of May 2026, with 3 plans available including a free tier. Plans: Free Trial (free), Flex at $45/month, and Premium at $400/month. The median contract is $7,296/year based on 3 verified purchases.

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

  • Free tier: Yes

Weaviate offers 3 pricing tiers: Free Trial, Flex, Premium. A free plan is available. Paid plans include Flex at $45/month, Premium at $400/month. The Flex plan is production teams on shared infrastructure.

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

  • Median contract: $7,296/yr from 3 purchases
  • 4 documented hidden costs beyond list price
Last verified:

How much does Weaviate cost?

Weaviate offers a free plan with 2 paid tiers from $45 to $400/month. Plans include Free Trial (free), Flex at $45/month, Premium at $400/month.

Weaviate Pricing Overview

Weaviate has 3 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $400/month. The Free Trial plan is free and is best for evaluation and prototyping. The Flex plan costs $45/month, best for production teams on shared infrastructure. The Premium plan costs $400/month, best for enterprise workloads needing sla and tam.

Weaviate and annual price increases of $369-$3,000.

The median Weaviate customer pays $7,296/year based on 3 verified purchases.

There are at least 4 documented hidden costs beyond Weaviate's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

This pricing was last verified in April 24, 2026.

Start Weaviate Free Trial

Weaviate pricing starts at $45/month for the Flex plan and $400/month for the Premium plan, with a Free Trial available at no cost. All paid plans use usage-based billing that scales with your embedding model's dimension count, the number of data objects stored, and monthly query volume — meaning actual costs depend on your specific AI workload. Custom pricing is available for enterprise deployments with specialized infrastructure requirements.

How Weaviate Pricing Compares

Compare Weaviate pricing against top alternatives in Vector Databases.

Pinecone $0-$500/month Compare → Qdrant $0-$0/month Compare → Chroma $0-$250/month Compare →
Live calculator

What does Weaviate actually cost you?

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

Tier
Billing
Your projected cost$1.1Kper month · $45/seat × 25 seats
Year 1 license$14K12 months at this rate
At a glance

List price by tier (annualized, per seat)

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

Free TrialCustom
Flex$540/yr
Premium$4.8K/yr
Real-world benchmark

Buyers actually pay a median of $7.3K/yr for Weaviate contracts (Vendr deal flow, n=3). That's a contract total — the more seats, the more leverage to negotiate down.

All Weaviate Plans & Pricing

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

Free Trial

  • 14-day free trial
  • Shared cloud sandbox
  • Full core toolkit
  • Query Agent: 250 monthly requests
  • Forum support

Flex

  • Pay-as-you-go, no commitment
  • Shared cloud deployment
  • Query Agent: 30,000 requests/month
  • Email support (next business day)

Premium

  • Prepaid contract, predictable pricing
  • Shared or dedicated deployment
  • Unlimited Query Agent requests
  • 1-hour Severity 1 response
  • Technical Account Team access
Start Weaviate Free Trial
Compare Weaviate with alternativesAdjust seats, lock a tier, add up to 2 more products side-by-side. Shareable URL.

Usage-Based Rates

Per-unit pricing for Weaviate API usage.

Flex

Item Dimension Unit Rate
flex-storage storage GiB month $0.255
flex-backup storage GiB month $0.026
Model / SKU Unit Price
flex-vector-dimensions 1M dimensions $0.014
  • Pricing varies by cloud provider, region, index type, and compression method

Premium

Item Dimension Unit Rate
premium-storage storage GiB month $0.212
premium-backup storage GiB month $0.022
Model / SKU Unit Price
premium-vector-dimensions 1M dimensions $0.00975
  • Requires prepaid commitment

Compare Weaviate vs Alternatives

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

VSPinecone
Free

Prototyping and small projects

Full comparison
VSQdrant
Free

Testing and prototypes

Full comparison
VSChroma
Free

Developers who want full control and can manage their own infrastructure

Full comparison

All Weaviate alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Weaviate

The median Weaviate buyer pays $7,296/year based on 3 verified purchase transactions.

What companies actually pay $7,296/yr Median across 3 community cost mentions
Review scores
Top pricing complaints
Managed cloud pricing becomes expensive at scale — $3,000/month for 50M high-dimensional vectorsNo hosted solution is affordable for very large datasets (hundreds of millions of vectors)Pricing complexity requires understanding vector dimensions and counts to estimate costs accurately
Source: Community cost mentions (Reddit, Hacker News) — aggregated from 3 distinct user reports. Indicative only — not contract-grade data.

Weaviate Year 1 Total Cost by Company Size

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

Starter: Flex Plan Minimum $45 Year 1 total

Small team or early-stage project on the Flex plan at its base rate, with modest embedding sizes and query volume.

Growing Team: Premium Plan $400 Year 1 total

A team with higher throughput requirements, larger embedding models, or greater object volumes moving to the Premium plan.

Prototype / Evaluation (Free Trial) $0 Year 1 total

Developer or team evaluating Weaviate for a RAG or semantic search prototype using the Free Trial tier on the managed cloud.

10 Million Vectors at 384 Dimensions (Managed Cloud) $369 Year 1 total
$4,428/year
Total $369

Mid-sized production deployment storing 10 million embeddings using a compact sentence-transformers model (384-dim) on Weaviate's managed cloud.

Self-Hosted on High-Memory VPS (~9M Embeddings) ~$50-$200/month (VPS infrastructure only, $0 software cost) Year 1 total
software cost $0
Total ~$50-$200/month (VPS infrastructure only, $0 software cost)

Team self-hosting Weaviate open-source on a 120GB RAM VPS (e.g., Contabo) to handle approximately 9 million 768-dimensional embeddings with no managed cloud fees.

Current tier data

How Weaviate Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Weaviate Free $400/month
Chroma Free $250/month
LanceDB Free $1000/month
Milvus Free $155/month
MongoDB Atlas Vector Search Free $56.94/per hour
pgvector Custom Custom

Detailed pricing comparisons:

Browse all Vector Databases pricing →

4 Weaviate Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Weaviate has at least 4 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 4 hidden costs
  • Multi-Axis Usage Scaling 10-50% of base license costs
    medium 1 source
    Hacker News "it can get expensive quickly because you're scaling over multiple axes"
    Hacker News "different algorithms in combination with different embeddings sizes (e.g., mpnet-base's 768 vs Cohere's 1024 vs OpenAI's 1536, etc) have a different memory footprint"
  • Embedding Model Choice Drives Infrastructure Cost 10-100% of base license costs
    medium 1 source
    Hacker News "The only three things a user needs to know are: embedding size of the model, data objects stored per month, and queries per month."
    Hacker News "memory is crucial because it's the thing that keeps your database persistent (i.e., you get a response in ms any time you query, no cold starts)"
  • Scaling Costs with Vector Count and Dimensions $369-$3,000
    high 3 sources
    Reddit "Weaviate: $369 for 10 million, source: https://weaviate.io/pricing/serverless"
    Reddit "their pricing slider goes up to 50m and for 600 dimensional vectors it says it will be $3000 a month, ouch! Probably self-hosting might be reasonable depending on what you are trying to achieve."
    Reddit "Weaviate says for 50M vectors is 608$"
  • Infrastructure Overhead for Self-Hosting $50-$200
    medium 2 sources
    Reddit "I had better luck indexing all of my objects in Weaviate by self-hosting, rather than using their managed service WCS, and I found that you can rent a server on Contabo with 120gb ram for what I felt was an affordable price relative to other options"
    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 Weaviate 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 2 independent sources
Hacker News Tech community Reddit User discussions
Key claims include inline source attribution. Data verified against multiple independent sources. 18 source citations total.

Weaviate Contract Terms

Weaviate contracts do not auto-renew. Changes require advance notice. These terms are sourced from verified buyer experiences.

Contract Terms
Price Escalation $369-$3,000
Based on 3 verified sources

How to Negotiate Weaviate Pricing

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

Negotiation Playbook 5 tactics
Self-Host to Eliminate Software Licensing Costs high success

Weaviate is fully open-source and can be run on your own hardware or a rented VPS at zero software cost. Community members report that a high-memory VPS (e.g., 120GB RAM on Contabo) is sufficient for 9 million embeddings and costs significantly less than the managed cloud at scale. Evaluate self-hosting when your monthly cloud bill approaches $200+/month.

Reddit (learnmachinelearning, vectordatabase subreddits)
Choose Smaller Embedding Dimensions to Reduce Cost high success

Weaviate charges based on the product of vector count × dimension size. Selecting a more compact embedding model (e.g., 384-dim sentence-transformers vs. 1536-dim OpenAI Ada) directly reduces costs proportionally. At 10M vectors the cost difference between 384 and 1536 dimensions can be 4x or more. The Weaviate founder confirmed this is the core pricing lever.

HN (Weaviate founder post, 2023-07-04)
Use the Free Trial to Profile Your Exact Usage Before Committing high success

Weaviate's Free Trial plan costs $0 and is intended for evaluation. Before upgrading to the Flex ($45/month) or Premium ($400/month) tier, use the trial period to accurately measure your actual vector count, average dimension size, and query-per-second requirements. Then input these into Weaviate's pricing calculator to forecast your exact monthly bill and avoid bill shock.

Reddit (LangChain, vectordatabase subreddits), Current Tier Data
Enable Product Quantization (PQ) to Compress Vector Memory medium success

Weaviate's pricing calculator explicitly shows the cost reduction from enabling Product Quantization, which compresses vector data and reduces the memory footprint used for billing. This can meaningfully cut monthly costs if your retrieval use case tolerates some recall degradation. One developer noted the transparency of the PQ savings in Weaviate's calculator, though they ultimately found recall loss too steep for their workload.

Reddit (learnmachinelearning subreddit, 2024-06-03)
Compare Flex Managed Plan vs. Low-Cost VPS for Small Workloads medium success

For small projects under a few million vectors, Weaviate's Flex plan at $45/month competes closely with a $50/month VPS. The managed plan adds reliability and zero ops overhead, while self-hosting gives full control and no vendor dependency. At this price band, choosing managed vs. self-hosted is primarily an engineering-time tradeoff, not a major cost decision.

Reddit (ChatGPTPro, vectordatabase subreddits)
High success Medium Low / difficult

Full negotiation guide →

Weaviate Pricing FAQ

01 How much does Weaviate cost?

Weaviate offers a 14-day free trial, then pricing starts at $45/month for the Flex plan (shared cloud, 99.5% SLA). The Premium plan starts at $400/month with dedicated deployment options, 99.95% uptime, and phone/Slack support. Usage-based charges apply for vector dimensions, storage, and backups.

02 Does Weaviate have a free tier?

Weaviate offers a 14-day Free Trial with a sandbox cluster. After the trial, you need a paid plan starting at $45/month. There is no permanent free tier, but Weaviate's open-source version can be self-hosted at no licensing cost.

03 What does Weaviate charge for beyond the base plan?

Weaviate charges usage-based fees for vector dimensions ($0.00975–$0.01668 per million), storage ($0.2125–$0.31875 per GiB), and backup storage ($0.022–$0.0264 per GiB). Rates vary by plan and region.

04 Is Weaviate open source?

Yes, Weaviate is open source and can be self-hosted for free. The managed cloud service (starting at $45/month for Flex) adds hosting infrastructure, SLAs, backups, and support on top of the open-source engine.

05 Weaviate vs Pinecone: which should I choose?

Weaviate's Flex plan at $45/month and Pinecone's Standard plan at $45/month are similarly priced. Weaviate offers more flexibility including hybrid search and multi-tenancy; Pinecone is simpler to get started with and has a permanent free Starter tier, unlike Weaviate's 14-day Free Trial.

06 How does Weaviate calculate its pricing?

Weaviate uses a dimension-based usage model built around three variables: the embedding size of your model (e.g., 768 dimensions for mpnet-base, 1024 for Cohere, 1536 for OpenAI), the number of data objects stored per month, and the number of queries per month. Paid plans start at $45/month (Flex) and $400/month (Premium), with actual costs scaling from those bases based on your workload.

07 Why can Weaviate costs be hard to estimate upfront?

Weaviate pricing scales across multiple axes simultaneously — embedding dimensions, stored object count, and query volume. A team switching from a 768-dimension embedding model to OpenAI's 1536-dimension model, for example, roughly doubles its memory footprint and associated costs. Users need to know their full workload profile (model size, throughput, QPS) before they can accurately estimate monthly spend.

08 Does Weaviate offer a free plan or free trial?

Weaviate offers a Free Trial tier at no cost for teams to evaluate the platform. Paid plans start at $45/month for the Flex plan and $400/month for the Premium plan.

09 What is the difference between Weaviate's cloud and hybrid/self-hosted pricing?

For cloud (SaaS) deployments, Weaviate charges based on usage across embedding dimensions, stored objects, and queries per month, with plans starting at $45/month (Flex). For hybrid or self-hosted deployments, customers pay for their own infrastructure and Weaviate applies a markup for additional services and software on top, typically calculated on an hourly basis.

10 Can I use Weaviate without paying for the managed cloud?

Yes. Weaviate is fully open-source and can be run on your own hardware or a rented VPS at $0 software cost. Community users have successfully self-hosted 9 million embeddings on a 120GB RAM VPS. You pay only for server infrastructure, which can be as low as $45/month for smaller workloads.

11 Does Product Quantization (PQ) reduce Weaviate's cost?

Yes. Product Quantization compresses your vector data, reducing memory footprint and thereby lowering Weaviate's managed cloud costs. Weaviate's pricing calculator shows the cost reduction from enabling PQ. However, PQ introduces some recall degradation — at least one developer found that the accuracy hit was too significant for their use case and chose not to use it.

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