For years, the most common question we got was some version of "Does Weaviate have a free tier?" And for years, my sincere answer was a little awkward: Weaviate has always been free. It's open source, and anyone can run Weaviate on their local machines or own clouds without paying us a cent.
And people do, at an incredible scale. Today, we see many millions of active Weaviate databases running every single month, and our client downloads are rapidly approaching double-digit millions.
So whenever someone asked for a free tier on Weaviate Cloud, part of me wanted to say: “You already have one, go run it yourself.” For a long time, this felt like a complete and principled answer. We didn't want to build a watered-down hosted version just to have a "Free" button on the pricing page when the most powerful free option, the actual open-source database, was already sitting right there.
What changed
Then we stopped being only a database.
