Comparison · 8 min · 4 citations
Weaviate vs Qdrant Pricing in 2026
Weaviate vs Qdrant pricing in 2026: per-dimension serverless billing against fixed-cluster cost, with verified rates, free tiers, and which wins at small scale.
For a small always-on RAG app in 2026, Qdrant's free-forever cluster (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB disk at zero cost[3]) beats Weaviate's paid Flex tier, which starts at $45 per month[2]. Weaviate offers a 14-day trial plus a sandbox, but not a free-forever paid cluster[2].
The two bill on different axes. Weaviate Cloud charges per million vector dimensions per month ($0.0139 on Flex, $0.00975 on Premium[1]), so cost scales with vector count times embedding dimension. Qdrant charges for the compute and memory a cluster reserves, with exact per-GB-hour rates not publicly documented[3]. At 200k 1,536-dimension vectors, Weaviate's dimension fee is only about $4.27 per month, but the $45 Flex entry price is the number that actually applies.
Verified as of 2026-05-25 against the official vendor pricing and documentation pages cited below.
Qdrant's free-forever cluster beats Weaviate's $45-per-month Flex tier for a small always-on app, and the choice above the free ceiling turns on billing axis: Weaviate charges per million stored vector dimensions while Qdrant charges for reserved cluster compute. A 1,536-dimension model costs more per vector on Weaviate than a 768-dimension model, because the bill scales with dimensions. This article runs the Weaviate per-dimension math on a concrete scenario and lays out the verified rates against Qdrant.
1. Per-dimension vs per-cluster: two billing axes
Weaviate Cloud's serverless model bills on stored vector dimensions: $0.0139 per million dimensions per month on the Flex tier and $0.00975 per million on Premium[1]. Total dimensions equal vector count times embedding dimension, so the same vector count costs nearly twice as much at 1,536 dimensions as at 768. The Flex tier carries a 99.5% SLA and a $45 per month entry price; Premium is $400 per month with a 99.9% to 99.95% SLA[2].
Qdrant Cloud bills on reserved cluster resources (vCPU, RAM, disk), hourly[3]. Dimension count affects only how much fits in a given cluster's memory, not a per-dimension line item. The exact paid per-GB-hour rate is not published on the official pricing page as of May 2026; Qdrant directs users to its calculator. The two models reward opposite workloads: Weaviate is predictable when dimensions are stable, Qdrant is efficient when a cluster runs busy.
2. Weaviate per-dimension math on the scenario
Scenario: 200,000 vectors at 1,536 dimensions. Total stored dimensions are 200,000 times 1,536, which is 307.2 million dimensions. The formula for the Weaviate dimension fee is total-million-dimensions times the per-million rate:
Flex dimension fee = 307.2 million dims × $0.0139 / million = $4.27 / month
Premium dimension fee = 307.2 million dims × $0.00975 / million = $3.00 / month
The dimension fee at this scale is tiny. What actually applies is the Flex tier's $45 per month entry price, since the metered dimension fee sits far below it[2]. The dimension model only becomes the dominant cost at large vector counts: a deployment of 5 million 1,536-dimension vectors with a replication factor of 2 reaches roughly $213 per month in dimension fees alone (7,680 million dimensions times $0.0139 times 2 replicas).
For storage-footprint reference at the same scenario, the Embeddings DB Cost engine reports the raw stored bytes (this engine prices Pinecone, pgvector, LanceDB, and Turbopuffer at current rates with plan minimums, not Weaviate or Qdrant, so the footprint line is the part that carries over to this pair):
Show the recompute-verified inputs and outputs
| vector_count | 200000 |
|---|---|
| dim | 1536 |
| queries_per_day | 2400 |
| ingest_per_day | 1500 |
| retention_days | 365 |
| vendors › row 1 › vendor | Pinecone |
|---|---|
| vendors › row 1 › monthly cost | 50 |
| vendors › row 1 › notes | Pinecone Standard 2026-05: ~$16/M read units, $4/M write units, $0.33/GB-mo, $50/mo plan minimum. Queries approximated as read units. |
| vendors › row 2 › vendor | Postgres+pgvector |
| vendors › row 2 › monthly cost | 35 |
| vendors › row 2 › notes | DigitalOcean managed Postgres baseline ($35/mo, includes 25GB; $0.20/GB-mo overage). Self-hosted equivalent. |
| vendors › row 3 › vendor | LanceDB |
| vendors › row 3 › monthly cost | 0.55 |
| vendors › row 3 › notes | LanceDB on Cloudflare R2 list pricing 2026-04: $0.015/GB-mo, $4.50/M ops. Self-hosted compute not included. |
| vendors › row 4 › vendor | Turbopuffer |
| vendors › row 4 › monthly cost | 64 |
| vendors › row 4 › notes | Turbopuffer 2026-05: Launch tier $64/mo minimum; metered $0.10/GB-mo, $0.04/M reads, $2/M writes above the floor. |
| cheapest vendor | LanceDB |
| cheapest monthly cost | 0.55 |
| storage gb | 1.43 |
Computed live at build time.
The engine reports a storage footprint near 1.43 GB at this scale, which both Weaviate's sandbox and Qdrant's free cluster (4 GB disk) hold comfortably.
3. Free and trial tiers compared
Weaviate offers a 14-day free trial plus a sandbox cluster carrying full core database functionality, then pay-as-you-go[2]. The sandbox is for evaluation, not a permanent free deployment. Qdrant offers a free-forever cluster (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB disk) that does not expire[3].
The distinction is decisive for a side project: Qdrant's free tier can host a real low-traffic app indefinitely, while Weaviate expects you to move to the $45 Flex tier after the trial. For evaluation and prototyping both work; for a permanent zero-cost deployment, Qdrant's free cluster is the only one that survives.
4. The verified comparison table
| Dimension | Weaviate Cloud | Qdrant Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Billing axis | Per million stored dimensions[1] | Per cluster compute/memory/disk[3] |
| Entry tier price | $45 / month (Flex)[2] | None (pay for cluster) |
| Dimension rate (Flex) | $0.0139 / M dims/mo[1] | Bundled into cluster |
| Premium tier | $400 / month[2] | Premium SLA tier (usage-based)[3] |
| Flex SLA | 99.5%[1] | 99.9% on premium tier[3] |
| Free tier | 14-day trial + sandbox[2] | Free-forever cluster[3] |
| Exact paid per-unit rate | Published[1] | Not publicly documented (calculator)[3] |
5. Which to pick
- Pick Qdrant if you want a permanent free cluster, predictable fixed-cost compute, or the option to self-host the identical engine later. Below the free-tier ceiling the cost is zero.
- Pick Weaviate if you want per-dimension billing that scales smoothly with no cluster to size, a published SLA tier, and a hybrid-search feature set, and your vectors are low-dimension enough that the per-dimension rate stays small. Budget the $45 Flex entry minimum.
- Watch the dimension count. Weaviate's per-dimension model penalizes high-dimension embeddings. If you use 1,536-dimension or larger vectors at volume, model the dimension fee carefully before committing.
For the full landscape, the cheapest vector database ranking prices eight vendors at one scenario, and the Pinecone vs Qdrant article covers the per-usage alternative to both.
Frequently asked questions
Is Weaviate or Qdrant cheaper in 2026?
For a small always-on app, Qdrant's free tier (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB disk at no cost) beats Weaviate's paid Flex tier, which starts at $45 per month. Weaviate's serverless model bills per million vector dimensions per month ($0.0139 on Flex), so cost scales with vector count times dimension count, while Qdrant bills for the compute and memory a cluster reserves. At 200k 1,536-dimension vectors, Weaviate's dimension fee is only about $4.27 per month, but the $45 Flex entry price dominates.
How does Weaviate Cloud serverless pricing work?
Weaviate Cloud bills per million vector dimensions stored per month: $0.0139 per million on the Flex tier (99.5% SLA, $45 per month entry) and $0.00975 per million on Premium ($400 per month entry, 99.9% to 99.95% SLA). Total dimensions equal vector count times the embedding dimension, so a 1,536-dimension model costs more per vector than a 768-dimension model.
Does Weaviate have a free tier?
Weaviate offers a 14-day free trial plus a sandbox cluster with full core database functionality, rather than a free-forever paid-tier cluster. Qdrant offers a genuinely free-forever cluster (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB disk). For a permanent zero-cost deployment, Qdrant's free tier is the one that does not expire.
References
Sources
Primary sources only. No vendor-marketing blogs or aggregated secondary claims.
- 1 Weaviate — Serverless pricing (per-million-dimension rates, Flex and Premium tiers, SLA) — accessed 2026-05-25
- 2 Weaviate — Pricing overview (Flex entry price, free trial and sandbox) — accessed 2026-05-25
- 3 Qdrant — Pricing (free tier specs, usage-based managed cloud) — accessed 2026-05-25
- 4 AI Biz Hub — Embeddings DB Cost methodology — accessed 2026-05-25
Tools referenced in this article
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