Best offer on record: Qdrant Cloud Free Forever tier. 4 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Qdrant Cloud Free Forever tier high confidence
Permanently free 1-node cluster: 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 4 GB disk, 'around one million 768-dimension vectors'. Free cloud-inference works on it, but only with free and external models (free models: sentence-transformers/all-minilm-l6-v2, intfloat/multilingual-e5-small, qdrant/bm25, answerdotai/answerai-colbert-small-v1). Tier is described as 'for testing, and prototypes' and 'without high availability'. Support: community, best-effort response, 99.5% uptime SLA. No HA, no VPC links, no enterprise SSO. Exceeding 1 GB RAM / 4 GB disk prompts upgrade to the Standard (paid) tier, where compute/memory/storage are billed hourly.
Eligibility
Open to anyone; no .edu, no funding or age cap. Credit card NOT required ('No credit card, no minimum spend' per qdrant.tech/cloud). No region limit stated on the page; cloud availability depends on the chosen infrastructure/region at signup.
How to claim
Sign up at cloud.qdrant.io/signup (the 'Start Free' button on qdrant.tech/pricing and qdrant.tech/cloud) -> choose Free plan and a region -> 'spin up a permanently free cluster in under 90 seconds'. No form review; instant activation.
Expiry
No expiry: explicitly 'free forever', not a trial. Free forever as long as the tier is not upgraded; on upgrade, hourly billing starts for compute, memory, storage, backups, and paid-model inference tokens. Data retention on free clusters is not documented.
Gotchas
Not high-availability; single node. Free inference is limited to free/external models - paid inference models are not free on the free tier (external models like OpenAI/Cohere/Jina are billed directly by the provider under your API key, no Qdrant markup, but not free). RAM/disk caps (1 GB / 4 GB) are the hard upgrade trigger. Community support only. The ~1M-vector figure is approximate ('around one million').
Free inference tokens on paid clusters (5M tokens/model/month) high confidence
Paid Qdrant Cloud clusters receive up to 5 million free inference tokens per model per month on paid inference models; BM25 hybrid search has no token cap. This is a recurring monthly free allotment, not a one-time trial. Paid inference otherwise billed per 1,000,000 tokens, with per-model rates shown in the Inference tab of the Cloud console. Qdrant-hosted paid models include mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-large-v1, qdrant/clip-vit-b-32-text/vision, prithivida/splade_pp_en_v1.
Eligibility
Any paid Qdrant Cloud cluster (Standard tier or above). No startup/student requirement, no credit cap. Note: the cap is stated per model, so different paid models each get their own 5M/month allowance.
How to claim
No separate claim step: create/upgrade a paid cluster, enable cloud inference in the console, and the free monthly tokens apply automatically. Prices per model are visible in the Inference tab of the Cluster Detail page.
Expiry
Recurring: 'per month' allowance, renews monthly with the subscription. BM25 is explicitly uncapped. No sunset date published.
Gotchas
The 5M figure comes from the FAQ on qdrant.tech/cloud (and is what 'free credits' known-so-far refers to) - it is not restated with the same number on qdrant.tech/pricing itself, so treat the exact cap as FAQ-stated. Free models (including qdrant/bm25) are free on all tiers including the free tier; the 5M free tokens specifically apply to PAID models on PAID clusters. No dollar-denominated trial credits for new customers were found on any page fetched.
Qdrant for Startups program (20% off for 12 months) high confidence
20% discount on Qdrant Cloud for 12 months from date of acceptance; no dollar cap on savings stated. Extras: partner perks from Hugging Face, LlamaIndex, and Airbyte, expert technical-advice sessions, and co-marketing (social media, Discord talks/webinars, case studies). Reviews in 7-10 business days; after a rejection you must wait 2 months to re-apply. Billing runs through Stripe (not a cloud marketplace), so discounted usage still requires a card.
Eligibility
Pre-seed, Seed, or Series A startups; under 5 years old; less than $5M in funding; must be a NEW user of Qdrant Cloud (existing customers qualify only if the cloud account was created within the last 30 days). Agencies and dev shops are explicitly NOT eligible. No employee/revenue cap and no region limit stated on the page. Credit card IS required to use the discount.
How to claim
Apply through the online form on qdrant.tech/qdrant-for-startups/ (do not email submissions). Provide startup details and planned Qdrant usage. Wait 7-10 business days for review; on acceptance add a credit card to the Qdrant account to activate the discount.
This is a 20% discount, not free - ongoing spend still applies and a credit card is mandatory (unlike the free tier). 'New user' rule means most incumbent Qdrant users cannot stack it; the 30-day account window is the only exception. No stacking rules with other discounts are documented. No geographic restriction is stated, but Stripe billing applies.
Education: free self-paced courses + free certification exam (no .edu program) medium confidence
Qdrant's education offer is free, not an academic license: (1) 'structured, free, online courses' on qdrant.tech/course - Beginner Course (<5h, embeddings/vector search/hybrid search + multimodal capstone), Essentials Course (9-12h, indexing/optimization/API), Multi-Vector Search Course (4-6h, ColBERT/ColPali/late-interaction); upcoming Intermediate (Optimizing Performance, Scaling and DevOps) and Advanced (AI Engineer, Search Engineer) tracks. (2) Qdrant Developer Certification at train.qdrant.dev: multiple-choice quiz based on the official docs and courses, self-paced, earns a public badge; registration is email/Google/LinkedIn-only with a verification code - no price is displayed anywhere on the registration or course pages.
Eligibility
Open to everyone - no .edu email, no student status, no enrollment or funding requirements. Not an education license or classroom license; no student-specific discount exists because the material is already free.
How to claim
Courses: go to qdrant.tech/course and start a course directly ('See Courses'). Certification: train.qdrant.dev/register -> 'Continue with Google/LinkedIn/email' -> verify -> complete the quiz at your own pace -> earn the badge. For more topics, email devrel@qdrant.com.
Expiry
No expiry or renewal noted; courses and exam are self-paced with no stated sunset. Upcoming advanced courses currently only have 'Register Interest' Google Form links, not open seats.
Gotchas
The courses page explicitly says free, but the exam page never labels itself 'free' - absence of any price/payment is the evidence, hence medium confidence that the exam is truly free vs. gated later. Free cloud-inference on self-hosted/open-source Qdrant is NOT available (cloud-only feature; docs suggest FastEmbed as the OSS alternative). Web search was unavailable in this session (budget exhausted), so any 2025-2026 changes not visible on the pages fetched today could not be cross-checked against news/blog posts.