Pricing

Chroma Cloud uses a simple, transparent, usage-based pricing model. You pay for what you use across writes, reads, and storage-with no hidden fees or tiered feature gating.

Need an estimate? Try our pricing calculator.

Writes

Chroma Cloud charges $2.50 per logical GiB written via an add, update, or upsert.

• A logical GiB is the raw, uncompressed size of the data you send to Chroma-regardless of how it's stored or indexed internally.
• You are only billed once per write, not for background compactions or reindexing.

Forking

• Forking a collection costs $0.03 per fork request.
• Forks are copy-on-write. You only pay for incremental storage written after the fork; unchanged data remains shared.
• Forking is available on Chroma Cloud. Learn more on the Collection Forking page.

Reads

Read costs are based on both the amount of data queried and the volume of data returned:

• $0.0075 per TiB queried
• $0.09 per GiB returned

How queries are counted:

• A single vector similarity query counts as one query.
• Each metadata or full-text predicate in a query counts as an additional query.
• Full-text and regex filters are billed as (N - 2) queries, where N is the number of characters in the search string.

Example:

await collection.query({
    queryEmbeddings: [[1.0, 2.3, 1.1, ...]],
    whereDocument: { "$contains": "hello world" }
});

use chroma::types::{Key, QueryVector, RankExpr, SearchPayload};

let search = SearchPayload::default()
    .r#where(Key::Document.contains("hello world"))
    .rank(RankExpr::Knn {
        query: QueryVector::Dense(vec![1.0, 2.3, 1.1]),
        key: Key::Embedding,
        limit: 10,
        default: None,
        return_rank: false,
    })
    .limit(Some(10), 0);

let results = collection.search(vec![search]).await?;

For the query above (a single vector search and a 10-character full-text search), querying against 10 GiB of data incurs:

• 10,000 queries × 10 units (1 vector + 9 full-text) = 100,000 query units
• 10 GiB = 0.01 TiB scanned → 100,000 × 0.01 TiB × $0.0075 = $7.50

Storage

Storage is billed at $0.33 per GiB per month, prorated by the hour:

• Storage usage is measured in GiB-hours to account for fluctuations over time.
• Storage is billed based on the logical amount of data written.
• All caching, including SSD caches used internally by Chroma, are not billed to you.

Sync

Sync pricing is usage-based:

• $0.04 per GiB processed — data processed through Sync, including S3 files, code repositories, and web pages.
• $0.01 per document page extracted — applies to document file types (PDF, Office documents, images, ebooks, HTML) that require conversion. See S3 Sync for the full list.
• $0.01 per page scraped — applies to web pages crawled during Web Sync.

Frequently Asked Questions