Chroma gives new accounts a $5 one-time signup credit rather than an ongoing free tier. The free plan includes $5 in free credits for the Starter plan, Supports up to 10 databases on the free Starter plan, and up to 10 team members on the free Starter plan.
About
Chroma is an open-source search infrastructure product for AI applications. It provides serverless search over vector, full-text, regex, sparse vector, and metadata indexes, with support for object-storage-backed storage and query-aware tiering.
The cloud offering is aimed at developers building retrieval and search systems that need low-latency queries, multi-tenant indexing, and managed operations. The pricing page lists a Starter plan with $0/month plus usage and $5 in free credits, along with 10 databases and 10 team members.
- Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search
- Sparse vector search with BM25 and SPLADE
- Serverless object-storage-backed architecture
- 10 databases on Starter plan
- 10 team members on Starter plan
- $5 in free credits
- Usage-based cloud pricing
- Apache 2.0 open-source codebase
Free Tier Value
This free tier is a capped starter offer with $5 in included credits, so it has real value but not a recurring monthly allowance. Because the page explicitly says a credit card is required for Starter and the credits are one-time rather than monthly, the practical monthly value is not defensibly expressed as a recurring dollar amount.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Access to the Starter plan at $0/month plus usage-based pricing.
- Includes $5 in free credits for the Starter plan.
- Supports up to 10 databases on the free Starter plan.
- Includes up to 10 team members on the free Starter plan.
- Provides access to the Community Slack on the free Starter plan.
See Chroma pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Starter
- databases
- 10
- team members
- 10
- Free credits included
- Usage-based pricing after credits
- 10 databases
- 10 team members
- Community Slack
Team
- databases
- 100
- team members
- 30
- $100 credits included
- Usage-based pricing after credits
- 100 databases
- 30 team members
- Slack support
- SOC II
- Volume-based discounts
Enterprise
- databases
- Unlimited
- team members
- Unlimited
- Custom pricing
- Unlimited databases
- Unlimited team members
- Dedicated support
- Single tenant clusters
- BYOC clusters
- SLAs
Pricing extracted from Chroma's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Chroma free forever?
No. Chroma gives new accounts a one-time signup credit of about $5.00, spent at normal usage rates, then the account moves to pay-as-you-go.
What happens when you exceed Chroma's free tier?
Once the signup credit runs out the account moves to pay-as-you-go pricing. Chroma's cheapest published paid plan is Team at $250 / month.
What is Chroma's free tier worth?
Chroma's free tier is worth about $5.00 in signup credit. That maps to an FTV score of 26/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
