Zilliz Cloud Pricing: Plans & Cost Calculator 2026
Individual developers can start for free, while Zilliz Cloud offers scalable paid options to compete with Pinecone.
Zilliz Cloud plans and pricing
Free
Learning & personal projects
Standard (Dedicated)
Prototypes & testing (non-critical)
Enterprise (Dedicated)
Production applications
Business Critical
Healthcare / finance / regulated mission-critical
On-demand Compute
Lake-scale search on external data
BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)
Custom infra / compliance
Zilliz Cloud pricing: the quick answer
Zilliz Cloud, the managed Milvus, starts free with 5 GB of storage, 2.5 million vCUs a month and up to 5 collections. Paid Dedicated clusters start at $126/mo for Standard and $197/mo for Enterprise, with serverless and Bring Your Own Cloud options billed by usage. Business Critical is a custom quote for HIPAA and GDPR needs. Open-source Milvus stays free to self-host. Your bill turns on the cluster tier and how much compute and storage you provision.
- FreeFree
- Standard (Dedicated)$126/mo
- Enterprise (Dedicated)$197/mo
- Business CriticalCustom
- On-demand ComputeCustom
- BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)Custom
At $126/mo to start, Zilliz Cloud sits 94% above the $65/mo median across 7 vector databases tools we track.
Zilliz Cloud cost calculator
Zilliz Cloud Hidden Costs & Pitfalls
The plan you pick sets a rate per million vectors, but storage, query speed and the serverless runtime meter all move the real bill, and the cheapest tier trades latency for that lower rate.
Zilliz Cloud pricing, read against its live plans and category
Positioning
Zilliz Cloud, the managed Milvus, opens with a free tier of 5 GB, 2.5M vCUs a month and 5 collections. Dedicated clusters are priced per million 768-dimension vectors: from $63 performance-optimized, $16 capacity-optimized, and $5 tiered-storage, with storage at $0.025/GB. A serverless option bills only active job runtime, and Business Critical is custom for HIPAA and GDPR. The three-way cluster pricing is the real value story, since you pay for the latency you actually need rather than a flat rate, which suits large datasets that are mostly cold.
Cost drivers
- 1Persistent storage is $0.025/GB on top of the per-vector CU cost on Dedicated plans.
- 2Serverless is billed per second of active runtime, which spikes if a workload queries or resyncs constantly rather than in bursts.
- 3BYOC deployments put the underlying AWS, GCP or Azure infrastructure bill on you, separate from the Zilliz charge.
Watch-outs
Pricing changes have frustrated small users moving off older pay-as-you-go structures onto higher minimums, which inflates cost for low-volume staging.
Strengths
- A CNCF project, battle-tested at billion-scale workloads.
- GPU acceleration and DiskANN for cost-efficient large-scale search.
- Distributed architecture that scales storage and compute independently.
Editor’s take
Startups and prototypers should use the free tier or serverless to skip always-on compute. Teams with large production datasets should pick a Dedicated cluster tier by the latency they can live with, since tiered-storage at $5 per million vectors is dramatically cheaper than performance-optimized at $63 for the same data. If you want a simpler flat-rate hosted database, compare Pinecone.
Oleh KemFounder & Lead AnalystZilliz Cloud price history
Cheaper Vector Databases tools
Frequently asked questions
Sources & verification
| Source | What was checked | Last checked |
|---|---|---|
| Official Pricing Page | Source of verified tiers | July 8, 2026 |
| Official Website | Official vendor website | — |
| G2 | G2 verified user reviews · 4.4/5 · 53 reviews | — |
Every fact on this Zilliz Cloud pricing page is tied to a named source and a verification date. Freshness-sensitive figures trace to the sources above; verify against the vendor before relying on them.
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