Chroma Cloud is shutting down: how to move your AI data

Chroma, the company behind one of the most used databases for AI search, announced on October 23, 2026 that it is joining Replit. As part of that, it is closing Chroma Cloud, its hosted service. If a support chatbot, internal question answerer or document search tool your business uses keeps its data in Chroma Cloud, that tool has two deadlines coming.

This guide is for owners and operations leads who had a developer or agency build an AI tool and are not sure what it runs on. We read Chroma's Cloud wind-down page, its announcement post and its docs on copying collections on October 26, 2026. We also read Pinecone's Chroma Cloud migration guide and Qdrant's migration tool the same day.

When an AI assistant answers questions from your own documents, it usually does not read every document each time. The documents are split into pieces, turned into numbers called embeddings, and stored in a vector database. When someone asks a question, the tool searches that database for the closest pieces and gives them to the AI model. Chroma Cloud is one hosted place to keep that database. If it goes away, the assistant can no longer find your documents.

Chroma's wind-down page sets two dates:

• On November 22, 2026, writes are disabled and Chroma Cloud becomes read-only. Chroma asks customers to stop or redirect anything that writes data, move active workloads, and start exporting before this date.
• On December 22, 2026, reads are disabled. Chroma asks customers to finish exporting, confirm their apps no longer call Chroma Cloud, and remove or rotate Chroma Cloud credentials before this date.

The first date is the one that catches people. After November 22, a tool on Chroma Cloud may still answer questions, but new help articles, new contracts or updated policies will not get added. It can look fine while it quietly falls out of date.

Open-source Chroma is not affected. Chroma says it stays under the Apache 2.0 license, that it added code from its private repositories to the open-source project, and that Replit will keep contributing to it. If questions come up during the move, Chroma lists support@trychroma.com on its wind-down page.

Ask whoever built your AI tools one direct question: does anything we run store data in Chroma Cloud? Other places to check are your company card statements for a Chroma bill and any notice emails from Chroma. A tool that runs open-source Chroma on your own server is outside this shutdown. Confirm which one you have.

1. 1Run open-source Chroma yourself. This keeps the same database, so your app code changes the least. Chroma's command line tool has a copy command that moves collections from Chroma Cloud into a Chroma server you run. The trade is that you now own the server, its backups, its updates and its security.
2. 2Move to another hosted vector database. Pinecone has published a migration guide with scripts for moving a Chroma Cloud collection. Qdrant's migration tool lists Chroma as a supported source. Both are run by a vendor, so there is less to operate, and you pay their pricing.
3. 3Use a database you already pay for. Many businesses already run Postgres, and Postgres can store embeddings with the pgvector extension. Fewer services means fewer bills and fewer logins to manage, but your developer will need to change more of the search code.

There is no single right pick. The choice comes down to who will maintain it, how much data you have, and what your developer already knows.

Pinecone's guide makes a point that is easy to miss. Your stored embeddings carry over without being redone as long as your app creates them with its own model. If your app used an embedding model hosted by Chroma Cloud, that model goes away with the service, and every document needs to be turned into embeddings again with a new model. Ask your developer which case you are in, because it changes the size of the job.

Treat this as a small, planned project. Here is the plan we would run:

• Inventory. List every tool that uses Chroma Cloud, what data it holds, who uses it, and where the original documents live.
• Pick the target. Choose one of the three options above based on who will look after it.
• Pause or redirect writes. Decide what happens to new documents during the move so nothing is lost between the copy and the switch.
• Copy and check counts. Copy each collection and compare record counts on both sides.
• Test with real questions. Run 20 to 30 questions your staff or customers actually ask against the old and new setup side by side, and compare the answers.
• Switch and clean up. Point the app at the new database, then remove or rotate the Chroma Cloud keys as Chroma asks.
• Set an alert. Add an error alert on the new setup so a failed search or a broken sync reaches a person. Our guide to error alerts for automations covers how.

Our testing AI agents before production guide has more on building that question set.

• Waiting until December. Once writes stop on November 22, you can still copy data out, but your tool stops learning anything new. Plan to switch before then if your documents change often.
• Search filters. Filters by customer, date or document type can work differently in a new database. A filter that silently matches nothing is worse than an error, so include filtered questions in your tests.
• Old keys. Chroma Cloud keys left in code or settings are a loose end. Remove them once the switch is done.
• One-off scripts nobody owns. If a contractor ran the move, ask for the steps in writing so the next person can repeat them.

If the tool is barely used, let it go. Export a copy for your records and shut it down. If the tool is small and you still have the original documents, it can be simpler to load those documents fresh into the new database than to copy the old one. And if you were already unhappy with how the tool answered, this is a good moment to decide whether to rebuild it properly or drop it.

This week, find out whether anything you run uses Chroma Cloud, and if it does, pick a target and a switch date before November 22. If you went through the same thing with another vendor recently, our OpenAI Agent Builder shutdown guide follows a similar plan.

If you want help, our free automation audit looks at the AI tools you run, tells you what depends on Chroma Cloud, and recommends where to move it. You can also see what our AI agent development and systems integration work includes.