The short answer
Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) is billed per compute-unit-hour + storage. It has a free tier: 5GB storage + compute credits, permanent free tier. The paid plans we list start at Pay-as-you-go (from ~$0.35/M vCU) (Serverless).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free (Serverless) | $0/month | Free serverless tier including ~5GB storage and a monthly vCU allowance; suitable for prototyping. Collections unlimited. |
| Serverless | Pay-as-you-go (from ~$0.35/M vCU) | Pay-per-operation model charged on read/write resource consumption plus storage; best for variable/low-traffic workloads. |
| Dedicated | From ~$99/month (compute + storage) | Reserved compute units (CU ~= 1 vCPU + 4GB RAM) at pay-as-you-go rates; 99.95% uptime SLA, production-grade performance and isolation. |
| Business Critical (BC) | Custom | Added Oct 2025 for teams with stringent security/compliance needs; enhanced isolation, support, and resilience. |
| BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) | Custom | Zilliz Cloud control plane operating inside the customer's own cloud account/VPC for data-residency and compliance requirements. |
How Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) bills you
The pricing model is per compute-unit-hour + storage. Fully managed Milvus with a generous permanent free tier, 99.95% SLA, and massive open-source lineage. Best suited to: managed milvus at billion-vector scale.
What to watch for on the bill
- Cost is the most cited complaint, managed pricing can be far more expensive than self-hosting Milvus on a cheap VPS for small/hobby projects
- vCU / CU-hour + tiered-storage billing model can be hard to forecast and reason about
The pricing page we read
Source: https://zilliz.com/pricing. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) with alternatives
- Pinecone vs Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) pricing
- MongoDB Atlas Vector Search vs Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) pricing
- Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) vs Supabase Vector (pgvector) pricing
Other vector database apis: Pinecone, MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, Supabase Vector (pgvector), Qdrant Cloud, Weaviate Cloud.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Zilliz Cloud (Milvus) pricing.