by Weaviate B.V.Vector databases
Managed hosting of the open-source Weaviate engine, billed by stored vector dimensions and storage, with a free tier and Flex from a $45 monthly minimum.
The open-source Weaviate engine run for you, with hybrid search, RBAC and multi-tenancy on every plan and no per-query or per-write charges.
Weaviate Cloud hosts the same engine you can run yourself under the BSD-3-Clause licence, so code written against it moves either way. The bill follows what you store (vector dimensions, disk and backups), not how often you query or write, so query traffic does not add to it. Every paid cluster runs three replicas with daily backups, and hybrid BM25 and vector search, RBAC scoped to collections and tenants, multi-tenancy and hosted embeddings come with every plan.
Against 3 other products we reviewed in Vector databases: what you pay for with each, the five access facts, the plan limits we recorded and each review's bottom line. The note under the table says how each one was checked.
| Metric | Weaviate Cloud | Zilliz Cloud | Qdrant Cloud | Pinecone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you're paying for | Saves engineering timeThe open-source Weaviate engine run for you, with hybrid search, RBAC and multi-tenancy on every plan and no per-query or per-write charges. | Saves engineering timeManaged Milvus with a serverless option billed per request, free bulk import from object storage, and the Apache 2.0 engine as a way out. | Worth the priceA managed open-source vector engine on nodes you size, with no per-query charge, an exit to self-hosted Qdrant and a free cluster for about 1M vectors. | Saves engineering timeA serverless vector index with hybrid search, hosted models, backups and bulk import on a plan bought online, with no servers or replicas to size. |
| Overall score | 6.2 | 7.2Best | 7.0 | 6.8 |
| Free option | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan | Free plan |
| Card to start | No card needed | No card needed | No card needed | –Not measured |
| Getting access | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve |
| Starter priceCheapest paid plan | $45/mo minimum | $4/million vCUs | $0.03566/node-hour | $20/mo |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based |
| Pricing page | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices |
| Billing unit | Vector dimensions, GiB of storage and GiB of backup, for each of 3 replicas | Serverless: vCUs and GB-month; Dedicated: CU-hours and GB-month | Provisioned nodes per hour (RAM, vCPU and disk), plus backup storage | Read units, write units and GB-month of storage (serverless) |
| Free option | Free cluster (100,000 objects), no card | Free 5 GB cluster, no card; $100 trial credits for 30 days | Free 1 GB cluster (about 1M 768-dimension vectors), no card | Starter free tier (2 GB, AWS us-east-1); 21-day Standard trial with $300 in credits |
| Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries) | $255/mo on Flex, official calculator | $113.28/mo on Serverless (GCP us-west1), computed | $102.51/mo on Standard (3 × mx1 nodes), official calculator | $176.60/mo on Standard, computed |
| Plan minimum | Flex $45 a month; Premium through sales | None | None on Standard; Premium minimum not published | Builder $20 flat; Standard $50; Enterprise $500 a month |
| Hybrid search | Every plan (BM25F plus vector, fused) | Every plan (BM25 full-text plus vector) | Every plan (dense plus sparse or BM25) | Every plan (dense, sparse and full-text indexes) |
| Backups | Daily on Flex, kept 7 days; restore through support | Dedicated clusters; point-in-time recovery on Business Critical | Standard and up, scheduled; collection snapshots on every plan | Standard and up, scheduled; $0.10 per GB-month |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 (Markdown copy of the security page) | SOC 2 Type II (under NDA) and ISO 27001:2022 | SOC 2 Type II; ISO 27001 not stated | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 |
| HIPAA BAA | Premium Dedicated, through sales | Business Critical, through sales | From Standard; BAA scope through Solutions Engineering | Standard add-on $190/mo (6-month minimum); included on Enterprise |
| EU regions | Region selection on Dedicated tiers; EU regions not named | Serverless in AWS Frankfurt; Dedicated in AWS, GCP and Azure EU regions | AWS Frankfurt and Ireland, GCP Frankfurt, Azure Germany West Central | AWS Ireland and Frankfurt, GCP Netherlands, from Builder |
| SSO | SAML on Premium | SAML or OIDC on Enterprise and up | Premium (console sign-in) | SAML on Standard and Enterprise |
| BYOC | Named on the security page; through sales | Through sales, annual commitment | Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud, through sales | Enterprise only, priced by sales |
| Data export | Cursor API; Parquet export not available on Cloud | SDK iterators; backup file export in private preview | Downloadable snapshots; scroll API | List and fetch API; no bulk export |
| Self-host path | Weaviate open source (BSD-3-Clause; some enterprise features licensed separately) | Milvus (Apache 2.0), same SDKs | Qdrant open source (Apache 2.0), restore from snapshot | None (Pinecone Local reached end of life on Oct 7, 2026) |
| Bottom line | From its public pages, Weaviate Cloud is the managed form of an open-source engine, billed by what you store with three replicas included. Enterprise controls sit on Premium through sales, and its rates are easiest to read through the calculator. | From its public pages, Zilliz Cloud is managed Milvus with per-request serverless billing, free bulk import, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and an open-source exit. Serverless runs in two regions only, and several prices differ between its pages. | From its public pages, Qdrant Cloud is managed open-source Qdrant billed by node-hour: no per-query charge, a large free cluster and a documented way back to self-hosting. Prices live in the calculator, and SSO and private networking need Premium. | From its public pages, Pinecone puts the most on a self-serve plan here: hybrid search, backups, bulk import, SAML SSO and a HIPAA add-on all on Standard. Query cost grows with namespace size, and there is no open-source engine to fall back on. |
Evidence: Weaviate Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Zilliz Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Qdrant Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Pinecone: facts checked 2026-10-16 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run. Prices in USD as listed, excluding tax. "–" means not recorded.
Review from public pages
Written from Weaviate Cloud's public pages (pricing, security or privacy, and docs) as read on Oct 16, 2026. We did not sign up, and no hands-on run is published yet.
We read Weaviate's pricing page (rendered in a browser, and the Markdown copy it serves at /pricing.md), its pricing calculator, the Weaviate Cloud docs on billing, cluster defaults, authentication, SSO, MFA, embeddings and export, the security page and its Markdown copy, the SLA, the Cloud and Enterprise agreements, the DPA and the subprocessor list on Oct 16, 2026; we did not create a cluster. The pricing page served US dollars from our location. The trust portal sits behind a bot check and did not load for us.
Billing is unusual for this category: Flex charges for vector dimensions, disk and backups at "from" rates that vary by index type, compression and region, with no time unit printed, and the pricing blog explains that dimensions are multiplied by the replication factor, three on every paid cluster. The calculator offers two profiles, both compressed: Performance Optimized (HNSW with RQ-8, the default) and Cost Optimized (HFresh index).
Some pages disagree. The Premium minimum is "from $400/month" in the FAQ and "Contact sales" in the plan table; a Plus plan with a $280 minimum appears in the Markdown copy (the enterprise page names it without a price) but not on the rendered pricing page; and the security page's Markdown copy says HIPAA is available on shared clusters, while the plan table lists it on Premium Dedicated only.
The managed service runs the Weaviate open-source project, so self-hosted Weaviate is a documented exit, with the cursor API and backups for moving data.
vs Pinecone: Pinecone and turbopuffer have no open-source engine with the same API.
Reads and writes are not metered; the bill follows stored dimensions, disk and backups, so 1M queries and 1M upserts a month add nothing in our scenario.
vs Pinecone: Pinecone bills about 7 read units per query on a 7 GB namespace.
Flex clusters are highly available by default and back up daily, kept 7 days; Premium keeps backups 30 or 45 days.
RBAC with roles scoped to collections, tenants and operations, API keys tied to roles, and MFA are available to every organization.
vs Pinecone: Pinecone limits API key permissions to All on Starter and Builder.
SAML SSO, HIPAA, PrivateLink (AWS) and customer-managed keys are on Premium, a prepaid contract through sales; Flex has none of them, and no plan lists an audit log.
Free holds 100,000 objects in 1 GB of memory; the cluster is suspended after 7 days without use and deleted after 30 days, with one warning email the day before.
Workaround: A suspended free cluster keeps its data until deletion.
There is no documented import from S3 or GCS into Weaviate Cloud, and the engine’s Parquet export "is not available in Weaviate Cloud"; restoring a backup goes through support.
Workaround: The cursor API pages through every object with its vectors.
Unit rates are "from" prices that vary by index type, compression and region, with no time unit, and the billing of three replicas is explained by the calculator and a blog post rather than the pricing page.
Workaround: The calculator and the console’s Running Costs module show rates for your data.
Weaviate Cloud bills stored vector dimensions (from $0.00465 per million on Flex), disk (from $0.12 per GiB) and backups (from $0.03036 per GiB), each for the three replicas of an HA cluster, with a $45 monthly minimum on Flex; reads, writes and, for now, data transfer are not billed. For our scenario the official calculator gives $255 a month on the default Performance Optimized profile (HNSW, RQ-8) and $198 on Cost Optimized (HFresh index, compressed); it offers no uncompressed profile. Query volume does not change that figure. Costs rise with objects and dimensions (10M objects come to $2,550 on Performance Optimized, $1,980 on Cost Optimized), embeddings from $0.025 per million tokens, the Query Agent ($30 a month) and Premium, priced by sales.
The cursor API pages through all objects with their vectors, and the migration guide covers copying data between instances; self-hosted Weaviate (BSD-3-Clause) runs the same API. The engine’s Parquet export to S3, GCS or Azure is not available in Weaviate Cloud, and restoring a managed backup needs support. Fees are non-refundable. The DPA deletes data within 30 days of cessation, while its annex mentions 180 days plus 180 in backups.
From its public pages, Weaviate Cloud is the managed form of an open-source engine, billed by what you store with three replicas included. Enterprise controls sit on Premium through sales, and its rates are easiest to read through the calculator.
| Limit | As recorded |
|---|---|
| Billing unit | Vector dimensions, GiB of storage and GiB of backup, for each of 3 replicas |
| Free option | Free cluster (100,000 objects), no card |
| Reference scenario (1M vectors, 1M queries) | $255/mo on Flex, official calculator |
| Plan minimum | Flex $45 a month; Premium through sales |
| Hybrid search | Every plan (BM25F plus vector, fused) |
| Backups | Daily on Flex, kept 7 days; restore through support |
| SOC 2 / ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 (Markdown copy of the security page) |
| HIPAA BAA | Premium Dedicated, through sales |
| EU regions | Region selection on Dedicated tiers; EU regions not named |
| SSO | SAML on Premium |
| BYOC | Named on the security page; through sales |
| Data export | Cursor API; Parquet export not available on Cloud |
| Self-host path | Weaviate open source (BSD-3-Clause; some enterprise features licensed separately) |
Read from the vendor's public pages on Oct 16, 2026. No hands-on run is published yet. How we check
We have not published a sign-up run for Weaviate Cloud yet. The access facts above were read from its sign-up and pricing pages on Oct 16, 2026.
We have not published API calls for Weaviate Cloud yet.
Weaviate Cloud lists 3 plans. The cheapest paid plan, Flex, costs $45/mo minimum.
Prices as listed, USD, excluding tax; observed 2026-10-16.
Source: weaviate.io pricing page. Prices change; the observed date above is when our agent read them.
We read the pricing pages, calculators, trust, legal and documentation pages of three managed vector databases on the same day and scored them on the same six indicators. What 1M vectors and 1M queries a month cost, where backups, SSO and HIPAA sit, how you get your data out, and who should pick which.
