How Chroma prices
Captured September 19, 2026 at 1440px wide.
Chroma plans and prices
| Plan | Price | Billing |
|---|---|---|
| StarterGet up and running quickly. | $0 | /month + usage |
| TeamScale your production use cases. | $250 | /month + usage |
| EnterpriseFor organizations prioritizing security, scale, support, and confidence. | Custom |
As printed on the page captured September 19, 2026.
How does Chroma pricing work?
The value metric is search consumption, split into four dimensions that each carry a unit: '$2.50' per GiB written, '$0.33' per GiB stored per month, '$0.0075' per TiB queried and '$0.09' per GiB returned. For a serverless vector database those four costs move independently, so an ingestion-heavy workload and a retrieval-heavy one each see their own driver on the bill. Plans wrap the meter: Starter is '$0/month + usage' with '$5 in free credits', 10 databases and 10 team members; Team is '$250/month + usage' with '$100 credits then usage-based pricing', 100 databases, 30 team members, Slack support, SOC II and 'Volume-based discounts'; Enterprise is 'Custom'.
The motion is developer-led with a sales tier. 'Get started for free' sits in the hero, Starter and Team convert through Sign up and Get started, and Enterprise routes to 'Get in touch' with unlimited databases, single tenant clusters, BYOC clusters and SLAs, the terms that shape a large deployment. The page is short and runs in the order a usage buyer thinks: the headline 'Simple, usage-based pricing. Just like the rest of Chroma Cloud.', a rate card styled as a terminal window, a pricing calculator, the three plans, five FAQ questions and a closing link to the Cloud documentation.
Under the hood this is a platform fee plus usage, with credits bridging the two. Team's $250 buys scale and assurance, 100 databases, 30 members, Slack support, SOC II and volume pricing, and returns $100 of it as usage credit, so a production team starts each month with usage already paid for. The calculator states its assumptions, 'Vector: 1536 Doc: 8192 bytes Metadata: 64 bytes', and moves in documents and queries, then subtotals each dimension: $34 written, $27 stored, $19 queried. Publishing the unit rates and letting the buyer compute the workload in engineering units is a structure worth borrowing for any infrastructure product billed on more than one meter.
What does Chroma's pricing page do well?
- All four metered rates appear in the hero with their unit attached: $2.50/GiB written, $0.33/GiB per month stored, $0.0075/TiB queried and $0.09/GiB returned
- The calculator declares its assumptions, 'Vector: 1536', 'Doc: 8192 bytes' and 'Metadata: 64 bytes', so a reader can judge how the estimate maps to their system
- Calculator sliders move in domain units, 1.0M docs, 6.0M docs and 10.0M queries at 4qps, and each row carries its own subtotal
- The calculator sits above the plans, matching the order a usage buyer thinks in: workload first, then plan
- The FAQ answers the questions a usage-billed buyer has, including 'Do unused credits rollover to the next month?' and 'Can I export my data if I decide to leave?'
What does Chroma's pricing page reveal about its pricing strategy?
- Four independent meters, write, storage, query and network, match the four costs that move separately in a serverless vector database
- Team pairs a $250 platform fee with $100 of included usage credit, so the fee buys scale and support while seeding the month's usage
- Plans scale on databases and team members, 10 and 10 on Starter, 100 and 30 on Team, unlimited on Enterprise
- Each rate sits in the unit its dimension naturally runs at, with query priced per TiB scanned and storage per GiB held
- Enterprise adds single tenant and BYOC clusters, deployment options that set the cost of serving an account and that the sales team prices directly
Learn with Orb
- ProductExperience Kit A calculator with stated assumptions turns documents and queries into per-meter subtotals and a $79 monthly total; Orb's Experience Kit builds calculators like this from one source of pricing truth.
- Guide14 usage-based pricing examples Write, storage, query and network each carry a published unit rate; Orb's guide walks through fourteen companies that charge for use, what each one meters, and a plain definition of the model.
Questions about Chroma pricing
How much does Chroma cost?
Chroma's pricing starts at $250/mo + usage. The page shows 3 plans, including a free plan, with the top plan priced through sales.
What pricing model does Chroma use?
Chroma prices by usage, combined with flat-rate tiers and credits. Buyers can sign up on their own or go through the sales team. Its plans are aimed mainly at developers.
Does Chroma have a free plan?
Yes, Chroma has a free plan. Paid plans start at $250/mo + usage.
Does Chroma offer an annual discount?
Chroma's pricing page shows a single billing period. The listed prices start at $250/mo + usage. Terms for the plans priced through sales are set with the sales team.
How is Chroma's pricing page laid out?
The page shows 3 plans and includes a calculator and an FAQ. The breakdown above marks 14 points on it: 7 things it does well and 7 insights into the pricing.
How does Chroma charge for write, storage, query and network usage?
Chroma bills usage on four separate meters: Write at $2.50 per GiB written, Storage at $0.33 per GiB per month, Query at $0.0075 per TiB queried and Network at $0.09 per GiB returned. The pricing calculator on the page shows an example workload where 1.0M docs written cost $34 and 6.0M docs stored cost $27. In the same example 10.0M queries at 4qps cost $19 for a usage total of $79 per month. It lists its assumptions as 1536-dimension vectors, 8192-byte docs and 64-byte metadata.
What does the Chroma Team plan include for $250 a month?
The Team plan is priced at "$250/month + usage" and comes with "$100 credits then usage-based pricing" for each month. It includes 100 databases, 30 team members, Slack support, SOC II and "Volume-based discounts" as part of the plan. Chroma describes it as the plan to "Scale your production use cases" on Chroma Cloud.
What does Chroma Enterprise include?
Chroma Enterprise has custom pricing and is built "For organizations prioritizing security, scale, support, and confidence." It includes unlimited databases, unlimited team members, dedicated support, single tenant clusters, BYOC clusters and SLAs. Buyers reach the sales team through the "Get in touch" button.
From the page as captured September 19, 2026. Current prices are on trychroma.com
Confluent
~$385/moConfluent prices serverless Kafka on a composite meter, eCKU-hours plus data in and out per GB plus storage per GB-month, and closes its rate table with an 'Estimated Monthly Starting Cost' of $0, $385, $895 and $2,300 that turns an hourly unit into a budget number. Behind it sit two discount structures and an annual commitment that can be spent across the whole Confluent Cloud stack.
Datadog
$15/host/moDatadog publishes a rate card per product, with every billable SKU listed in a left-hand navigator from AI Credits to Workflow Automation. Infrastructure Monitoring prices per host across three host levels: Basic, set with sales, beside Pro starting at $ 15 and Enterprise at $ 23 billed annually, with on-demand rates printed beside them and allotments of containers, custom metrics and custom events attached to each paid host. The bill is the sum of the products a customer adopts, and Basic hosts let one account price noncritical workloads at their own level.
Fly.io
From $0.0030/hr (shared-cpu-1x, 256MB)Fly.io prices raw infrastructure: Machines 'Billed by the second while a Machine runs', volumes on provisioned capacity, and egress by region, with prices set per region through a selector. Support is sold as its own ladder at '$29 / mo', '$199 / mo' and 'From $2,500 / mo', compliance is a '$99/mo' add-on, and a Custom plan covers committed spend and volume discounts.
Grafana
$19/moGrafana Cloud prices on a $19 per month platform fee that carries an allowance on every product, then a usage meter chosen per product, with volume tiers that lower the marginal rate as a customer grows. The hero states the thesis, 'Send more, charge more is broken. We are changing it.', and the page backs it with an embedded calculator that draws the tier curve and a cost-reduction band under the rates. Enterprise prints its entry point: 'Starts at $25,000 / year spend commit'.
Modal
$250 + compute/moModal bills GPU, CPU, memory and storage by the second or month, and network egress at '$0.04 / GiB', with the full rate card under the promise of paying for 'just actual compute time, by the CPU cycle'. Plans are a platform fee plus that usage: Starter at $0 with $30 of monthly credits and 1 TiB of egress, Team at $250 with $100 and 10 TiB, and a custom Enterprise with 100 TiB. A worked comparison makes the serverless case on utilization, with a $3.95 GPU-hour that totals '12% lower cost' than $3 GPU-hours provisioned around the clock.
MongoDB
$0.011/hourMongoDB Atlas prices two product lines by the hour, each translated into a monthly figure. Atlas Core keeps Free at $0, Flex at $0.011 an hour with 'Up to $30/month', and Dedicated at $0.08 an hour that 'Starts at $56.94/month', while Atlas Infinite adds a public-preview tier at '$0.09 /hour' that 'starts at $65/month' for elastic AI workloads. Flex remains the design to study, a usage tier with a printed ceiling, and Infinite shows a premium tier layered on the same hourly meter.