Chroma Cloud goes read-only on 7 December as Chroma joins Replit

Chroma Cloud goes read-only on 7 December as Chroma joins Replit

9 November 2026: Chroma Cloud, the hosted version of the ChromaDB vector database, stops accepting writes on 7 December 2026 and stops answering reads on 22 December, after Chroma signed a definitive agreement to join Replit. Any application that stores or retrieves embeddings through the hosted service has four weeks before its data becomes frozen and six weeks before it can no longer be reached.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on two posts by Chroma, both dated 23 October 2026, and we have not read a statement from Replit. Chroma gives no price and no closing date for the deal. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Two cut-offs, fifteen days apart

The company set out the timeline on the day it announced the deal. On 7 December, 45 days after the notice, Chroma Cloud becomes read-only, and applications can no longer create, update or delete anything held there. Existing data stays available for reads for the next 15 days. On 22 December, 60 days after the notice, read requests stop.

A retrieval system usually writes as well as reads, because new documents have to be embedded and added as they arrive. A chatbot answering from a Chroma Cloud collection may look healthy after 7 December while its knowledge quietly stops growing, and the failure may first appear as a stream of write errors in a background ingestion job. Teams should move those jobs first.

Chroma asks customers to stop or redirect writing workloads, begin exporting and validating data before the first date, finish exports before the second, confirm that migrated applications no longer call Chroma Cloud endpoints, and remove or rotate the Chroma Cloud credentials left in their applications and infrastructure.

Open-source ChromaDB stays, and got a little larger

The wind-down applies only to the hosted service. ChromaDB remains under the Apache 2.0 licence, and the page says Replit will continue contributing to the project. Jeff Huber, Chroma's chief executive, wrote that the team has moved additional code from its private repositories into the Apache 2.0 repository "to give the strongest continuity story for open-source Chroma". He puts the project at 6 million downloads a month and just under 30,000 GitHub stars.

That gives hosted customers an option that most closing services do not offer: running the same database themselves, on their own infrastructure. The posts do not describe a migration tool, name a recommended host, or offer refunds for prepaid plans, so a customer on a paid contract should ask support@trychroma.com before the first date.

What Replit is buying

Chroma started in 2022 working on training data for deep learning, then shifted towards context for AI agents after ChatGPT's release. Mr Huber's post names SpaceXAI, Mintlify, Krea, Paramount, Retool and CoreWeave among customers. Replit's chief executive Amjad Masad and its president Michele Catasta were early investors in Chroma, and the plan is to carry on with ChromaDB and a product called Foundation inside Replit, as what the post calls a context layer for companies run increasingly by agents.

"We first met Jeff and the team in early 2023," Mr Catasta said in the post, adding that the company was "immediately struck by the talent" it found.

Alternatives on our list

Chroma is one of 10 products in our vector database category, alongside Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant and Milvus. Exported vectors stay useful in another database only while queries are embedded with the same model, so the model name belongs in the export record alongside them.

Sources

• Chroma: Chroma Cloud wind-down timeline, 23 October 2026
• Chroma: Chroma is joining Replit, by Jeff Huber, 23 October 2026