Create your free vector namespace
Bring your own vectors and run your first search in minutes — your first 1M vectors are free, no extractors or schema required.
Quickstart
1
Create a namespace
No schema needed — MVS infers vector dimensions on first write.You can optionally pre-declare vector configs if you want to set a specific distance metric:
2
Upsert documents with your vectors
3
Create a retriever (one-time)
Querying is unified on retrievers — one query concept whether you bring your own vectors or promote to managed embedding. Create a retriever once; for a standalone namespace it takes the query vector you computed (
input_mode: vector). All requests are scoped to the namespace via the X-Namespace header.4
Execute the retriever
Run the retriever with your query embedding. Each hit exposes
document_id and payload fields.Architecture
Scaling
The index auto-partitions as you grow — there’s no capacity planning, resharding, or replica provisioning on your side, and no per-vector or per-namespace caps. The same namespace serves thousands or hundreds of millions of vectors. At large scale (10M–100M+ vectors), two things matter:- Tiering. Hot (in-memory) vectors serve at ~10ms; cold (object-storage) vectors serve at ~100ms via brute-force scan. The vector store keeps your actively-queried set resident automatically — there’s no manual tier management on your side.
- Shard visibility. The
shards.hot/shards.coldcounts in namespace usage metrics show how the index has partitioned. Dedicated/enterprise deployments can tune shard and index parameters — see Single-Tenant.
Need concrete latency/recall targets for a specific corpus size and query rate? Talk to engineers — sizing depends on dimensions, filter selectivity, and your hot/cold split.
Standalone vs Managed
Every namespace runs in one of two modes. Start standalone and promote when you’re ready — no reindexing.Features
All features work identically in standalone and managed modes.Billing
MVS pricing is pure usage-based — no per-vector caps, no namespace limits. Tiers gate support level, not features.
Your first 1M vectors are free on the Starter tier.
All search features (dense, sparse, BM25, hybrid, adaptive indexes) are available on every tier. See the pricing calculator for cost estimates at scale.
Track usage programmatically with the vector-backend usage endpoint (
GET /v1/organizations/billing/usage/vector-backend) or view it in the Studio dashboard under Billing.
Next Steps
Namespaces
Vector indexes, metrics, BM25
Documents & Search
Upsert, query, manage
Promote
Standalone → managed
Ready to go beyond BYO vectors? Promote your standalone namespace to managed mode and add automatic embedding, file processing pipelines, and enrichment — without reindexing. Your retrievers keep working unchanged — after promotion, the same retriever can auto-embed raw text instead of taking a pre-computed vector. See the migration guide for details. Learn how to promote →

