Chroma is joining Replit, and Chroma Cloud stops taking writes on 22 November

Chroma, the company behind the popular open-source vector database, has signed a definitive agreement to join Replit, CEO Jeff Huber wrote on 23 October. The team will build what both companies call the “context layer” for Replit’s agents. Terms were not disclosed.

The part that matters for developers is the hosted service. Chroma Cloud is winding down over 60 days, on this timeline:

• 22 November 2026: writes disabled. Chroma Cloud becomes read-only. No creates, updates or deletes.
• 22 December 2026: reads disabled. Chroma Cloud stops serving queries.

Chroma asks customers to stop or redirect writing workloads, export and validate their data before the first date, finish exports before the second, and then remove or rotate Chroma Cloud credentials in their apps and infrastructure.

Open source is not affected

Open-source ChromaDB stays under the Apache 2.0 licence. Chroma says it has about 6 million downloads a month and nearly 30,000 GitHub stars, that code it had kept private is being committed to the open repository, and that Replit will keep contributing. If you self-host Chroma, nothing changes today.

Where to move

Two rivals published migration guides within days:

• Pinecone (guide, 26 October): six Python scripts (preflight, create index, export, convert, load, validate) move one collection with its vectors, documents and metadata into a serverless index during a planned write pause, without re-embedding. Pinecone offers Chroma Cloud users a three-week Standard trial with $300 in credits, and says the toolkit is provided as-is.
• Qdrant (docs): its qdrant-migration Docker tool streams a Chroma collection into Qdrant. One gotcha it flags: the tool does not read your collection’s distance function and defaults to Euclidean, so set --qdrant.distance-metric if you used cosine or inner product.

The third option is to keep Chroma and run it yourself, or on another host.

Two traps apply wherever you go. If your app relied on an embedding model hosted by Chroma Cloud, that model goes away too, and Pinecone notes you would then need to re-embed. And plan the cutover for before 22 November: after that, Chroma enforces a write pause for you, and any writes your app still sends will fail.

For background on what a vector database does, see our explainer series.