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FreeFreeStandardFreeEnterprise$155/mo
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All Zilliz Plans & Pricing

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

Free

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

Standard

  • From $0/month (Serverless), From $99/month (Dedicated)
  • Fully managed vector databases with core APIs
  • Backup, restore, and basic monitoring
  • Built-in encryption for data in transit and at rest
  • Multi-cloud: AWS, Google Cloud
  • 30-day free trial for Dedicated

Enterprise

  • From $155/month (Dedicated)
  • 99.95% uptime SLA
  • Audit logs and SSO (SAML 2.0)
  • Granular RBAC
  • Multi-replica and elastic scaling
  • Private endpoint and VPC peering
  • Enterprise support included
  • Multi-cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure

Business Critical

  • Custom pricing
  • Global cluster with high availability and disaster recovery
  • Advanced security: CMEK and full-path in-transit encryption
  • HIPAA-eligible with enhanced data privacy features
  • Priority support and rapid incident response
  • 99.99% uptime SLA with multi-replica
  • Healthcare, finance, and government use cases
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Tier
Billing
Your projected cost$3.9Kper month · $155/unit × 25units
Year 1 license$47K12 months at this rate
At a glance

List price by tier (annualized, per unit)

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

FreeCustom
StandardCustom
Enterprise$1.9K/yr
Business CriticalCustom
Quick Answer
Last verified:
High confidence

Zilliz costs Free to $155 per month as of July 2026, with 4 plans available including a free tier. Plans: Free (free), Standard (free), and Enterprise at $155/month. Enterprise pricing is available on request. Pricing depends on your chosen tier, contract length, and negotiated discounts.

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

  • Free tier: Yes

Zilliz offers 4 pricing tiers: Free, Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical. A free plan is available. Paid plans include Enterprise at $155/month. The Standard plan is prototypes, testing environments, and non-critical workloads.

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

  • 23 documented hidden costs beyond list price
  • G2 rating: 4.7/5 from 65 reviews
Last verified: | Sources: 2 pricing pages and reviews

How much does Zilliz cost?

Zilliz offers 4 pricing plans, starting with a free tier and scaling to custom enterprise pricing. Plans include Free (free), Standard (free), Enterprise at $155/month, Business Critical (custom pricing).

Zilliz Pricing Overview

Zilliz has 4 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $155/month. The Free plan is free and is best for learning and personal projects. The Standard plan is free and is best for prototypes, testing environments, and non-critical workloads. The Enterprise plan costs $155/month, best for production ai applications requiring enterprise-grade reliability. The Business Critical plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote and is designed for regulated industries with strict compliance requirements.

Zilliz requiring any time for pay-as-you-go via AWS Marketplace notice to cancel.

There are at least 23 documented hidden costs beyond Zilliz's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

This pricing was last verified in May 5, 2026 from 2 independent sources.

Try Zilliz Free
Zilliz Cloud is the fully managed vector database built on open-source Milvus, operated by the team that created Milvus. It offers a permanent free tier (5 GB, 2.5M vCUs/month), a serverless tier billed at $4/million vCUs and $0.04/GB/month storage, and dedicated clusters starting at approximately $99/month. As of January 2026, storage pricing was cut 87% from $0.30 to $0.04/GB/month across all clusters.

How Zilliz Pricing Compares

Compare Zilliz pricing against top alternatives in Vector Databases.

Milvus $0-$155/mo Compare → LanceDB $0-$1000/mo Compare → Pinecone $0-$500/mo Compare →

Compare Zilliz vs Alternatives

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

VSMilvus
Free

Prototypes, testing environments, and non-critical workloads

Full comparison
VSLanceDB
Free

Local development, edge deployments, and self-hosted production

Full comparison
VSPinecone
Free

Production workloads on serverless

Full comparison

All Zilliz alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Zilliz

Review scores
G2 4.7/5 (65)
Top pricing complaints
Pricing: Some users find the pricing to be high, especially for extensive storage needs or for smaller projects and individual developers.Deployment Dependencies: The standalone deployment of Zilliz is noted to have a few too many dependencies.Schema Migration Complexity: Modifying collection schemas can involve a complex and time-consuming migration process.Development Roadmap Pace: The large and active community, while beneficial, can lead to diverse and complex demands that may affect the development roadmap's pace.

How Zilliz Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Zilliz Free $155/month
Chroma Free $250/month
LanceDB Free $1000/month
Milvus Free $197/month
MongoDB Atlas Vector Search Free $56.94/per hour
pgvector Custom Custom

Detailed pricing comparisons:

Browse all Vector Databases pricing →

23 Zilliz Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Zilliz has at least 23 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 23 hidden costs
  • Storage Minimums & Suspended Charges
    medium 1 source
    industry "There is a minimum charge for storage: 1 hour for cluster and volume storage, and 1 day for backup storage."
  • Idle Compute Charges ~$7,000/month
    high 1 source
    industry "One customer reported paying ~$7,000/month for a 24 CU Tiered cluster that was only actively used for 2-3 hours a month, meaning 99.6% of the spend went to idle capacity."
  • Data Transfer Fees
    medium 1 source
    industry "Data Transfer Costs: Data transfer can incur additional charges in scenarios such as search/query operations, forwarding audit logs to cloud object storage, data synchronization for zero-downtime migration, offline migration, cross-region backup, ..."
  • Audit Log Resource Consumption
    low 1 source
    industry "Audit Logs: If enabled, audit logs consume additional system resources and are billed."
  • Embedding & Inference Fees
    critical 1 source
    industry "These costs can sometimes match or exceed the database bill itself, depending on data churn and query patterns."
  • Operational Overhead (Self-Hosting/BYOC)
    high 1 source
    industry "Operational Overhead (for self-hosting or BYOC): For those considering open-source Milvus or Zilliz Cloud's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) option, operational costs can include hardware, setting up dependencies (Kafka, Pulsar, etcd, Kubernetes), load..."
  • Cold-Query Premium
    medium 1 source
    industry "This means workloads with mostly "hot" (frequently accessed) queries may end up subsidizing "cold" ones, making it less cost-effective for stable, high-frequency workloads once query volume is not trivially low."
  • Idle Compute in Dedicated Clusters 99.6%
    high 1 source
    industry "A customer with a 24 CU Tiered cluster could face a monthly bill of approximately $7,000, even if the actual analytics work only consumes a few hours, leading to 99.6% of the spend going to idle capacity."
  • Suspended Cluster Storage Costs
    medium 1 source
    industry "Storage costs continue even if a cluster is suspended."
  • Egress Fees
    high 1 source
    industry "Zilliz Cloud does charge for data transfer in scenarios such as search/query operations, forwarding audit logs to cloud object storage, zero-downtime migration data sync, offline migration, cross-region backup, and using third-party model providers."
  • Index Rebuild Costs $12–$40
    medium 1 source
    industry "For example, re-indexing 10 million vectors can cost approximately $12–$40 in write operations on some platforms."
  • Query Costs Scaling
    high 1 source
    industry "The same search might become significantly more expensive as data grows."
  • Developer Complexity
    medium 1 source
    industry "Complexity for Developers: Learning new query languages, writing wrappers, managing SDKs, and handling version mismatches can add to development costs."
  • Performance Mismatch for Small Datasets
    medium 1 source
    industry "For smaller datasets, using a vector database might lead to slower queries compared to in-memory solutions like FAISS or NumPy, or even DuckDB with cosine similarity, effectively becoming a hidden performance cost"
  • Reindexing and Backups potentially double a bill
    high 1 source
    industry "Reindexing and Backups: Hidden fees can include costs for reindexing and backups, which can potentially double a bill"
  • Audit Logs
    low 1 source
    industry "Audit Logs: If enabled, audit logs incur additional charges as logging consumes system resources"
  • Scaling Job Billing
    low 1 source
    industry "Scaling Job Billing: During a scaling job for a Zilliz Dedicated cluster, billing continues based on the previous configuration until the scaling job is successfully completed and the new configuration is applied"
  • Engineering Time (Self-Hosted Ops) $1,500–$3,000/month
    high 1 source
    industry "Engineering teams might spend 10-20 hours monthly on operations, which, at an engineering rate of $150/hour, translates to $1,500-$3,000/month in hidden costs that are often not budgeted for"
  • Model Drift Mitigation & Compliance $500–$2,000 per cycle
    medium 1 source
    industry "Model Drift Mitigation and Compliance: Less obvious long-term costs include mitigating model drift, which may require periodic retraining (e.g., quarterly GPU cluster usage for $500–$2,000 per cycle), and ensuring regulatory compliance (e.g."
  • Storage for Inactive Vectors
    low 1 source
    industry "Storage for Inactive Vectors: While Zilliz Cloud's tiered storage aims to optimize costs by moving less frequently accessed data to cheaper storage tiers, maintaining data in a "query-ready" state still incurs costs"
  • Development and Maintenance $0.50–$1.50 per hour, $10–$20/hour
    high 1 source
    industry "Development and Maintenance: Costs include compute instances for running embedding models (e.g., a GPU instance like an NVIDIA T4 might cost $0.50–$1.50 per hour for inference), data processing pipelines (e.g."
  • Vendor Lock-in
    critical 1 source
    industry "Vendor Lock-in: Relying on a proprietary vector database might limit migration options, potentially leading to costly rewrites in the future"
  • Storage Costs $0.04 per GB per month
    medium 1 source
    industry "Storage Costs: While Zilliz Cloud has standardized storage pricing at $0.04 per GB per month across major cloud providers as of January 1, 2026, it's crucial to note that storage charges apply even when a dedicated cluster is suspended"
Tip

Ask your Zilliz 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
industry G2 B2B reviews
Key claims include inline source attribution. Data verified against multiple independent sources. 24 source citations total.

Zilliz Contract Terms

Zilliz contracts do not auto-renew. Changes require any time for pay-as-you-go via AWS Marketplace. These terms are sourced from verified buyer experiences.

Contract Terms
Cancellation Notice any time for pay-as-you-go via AWS Marketplace
Minimum Commitment Free tier offers 5 GB storage, 2.5 million vCUs per month, and up to 5 collections; Serverless and Dedicated models are pay-as-you-go.
Based on 1 verified source

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