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
FreeBest for: Learning & personal projects
- ✓5 GB storage
- ✓2.5M vCUs/mo included
- ✓Up to 5 collections
- ✓Serverless
Standard (Dedicated)
from $126/GB/moBest for: Prototypes & testing (non-critical)
- ✓From $0/mo serverless OR $126/GB-mo dedicated
- ✓Fully managed core APIs
- ✓Backup & restore
- ✓Basic monitoring
- ✓Encryption in transit + at rest
Enterprise (Dedicated)
from $197/moBest for: Production applications
- ✓99.95% uptime SLA
- ✓Audit logs
- ✓SSO (SAML 2.0)
- ✓Granular RBAC
- ✓Multi-replica + elastic scaling
Business Critical
Contact SalesBest for: Healthcare / finance / regulated mission-critical
- ✓Global cluster HA + DR
- ✓CMEK + full-path encryption
- ✓HIPAA-eligible
- ✓Priority support
Zilliz Cloud pricing: the quick answer
Zilliz Cloud, the managed Milvus, starts free as of July 8, 2026 with 5 GB of storage, 2.5 million vCUs a month and up to 5 collections. Paid Dedicated clusters are priced per million 768-dimension vectors, trading speed for cost: performance-optimized from $63, capacity-optimized from $16, tiered-storage from $5, plus storage at $0.025 per GB. A serverless option bills per second of active runtime, and Business Critical is custom for HIPAA and GDPR. Open-source Milvus stays free to self-host. Your bill turns on vector count and the query speed you need.
- FreeFree
- Standard (Dedicated)$126/GB/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 8 vector databases tools we track.
Zilliz Cloud cost calculator
What Zilliz Cloud really costs
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.
Pricing Expert Take
Independent analysis · Zilliz Cloud
Value Analysis
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.
Hidden Costs
- Persistent storage is $0.025/GB on top of the per-vector CU cost on Dedicated plans.
- Serverless is billed per second of active runtime, which spikes if a workload queries or resyncs constantly rather than in bursts.
- BYOC deployments put the underlying AWS, GCP or Azure infrastructure bill on you, separate from the Zilliz charge.
Red Flags
Pricing changes have frustrated small users moving off older pay-as-you-go structures onto higher minimums, which inflates cost for low-volume staging.
"affected by their outrageous $50/month pricing (we currently pay around 60 cents per month)"
"with the disk index, you can store 500m vector with less than 100cu"
Based on analysis of recent Reddit and G2 discussions.
Green Wins
- 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.
"Built with the power of Milvus, Zilliz Cloud is a cloud-native vector database with"
G2
Verdict
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.
Zilliz Cloud price history
Cheaper Vector Databases tools
Frequently asked questions
How does Zilliz Cloud pricing compare?
See how Zilliz Cloud's 6 pricing plans stack up against similar Vector Databases tools.
Research Reports
Sources & Data Trail · Zilliz Cloud
- 1.Official Pricing Page·Source of verified tiers(Checked: 2026-07-08)
- 2.Official Website·Official vendor website
- 3.G2·G2 verified user reviews · 4.4/5 · 53 reviews