Self-host vector DB

Scores as of 2026-10-19 (8 days old).

Depot Pick

Qdrant · 8.57/10 for this job (curated estimate, high confidence)

capability + lockInRisk low + dx of ops.

Runner-up

Weaviate · 8.15/10

Scores higher than the pick on: Maturity / track record.

When not to use the pick

No ops appetite — Pinecone/Qdrant Cloud. Billion-scale specialized — Milvus/Zilliz.

Lock-in / migration

The pick has lower stored lock-in risk than runner-up Weaviate (3 vs 3.5). Pick exit signals: open source (provider tag `oss`). Self-host fallback listed for this job: Chroma, Qdrant, LanceDB.

Sourced price (no comparable unit)

Pick: no sourced price in this job's unit (no_sourced_price).

No cheapest SKU (no_comparable_unit_for_job). No price was invented.

Free option

• Chroma (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• FAISS (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• LanceDB (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25

Failure modes to watch

• Stale retrieval: Store the source URL and the time it was fetched. If a newer canonical page exists, or two stored sources disagree, do not answer from the older one.
• Context overflow: If the input exceeds the window, say so and retrieve a narrower slice. Do not answer from a truncated head as if it were the whole source.
• Lost in the middle: Ask the agent to name the passage it used. Spot-check questions whose only support sits in the middle of the context, not only at the edges.
• Non-determinism: Run the task more than once and compare the end state, not a single transcript. Record the trial count next to any success rate you cite.
• Schema drift: Validate every tool call and every loaded table against the current schema. Quarantine mismatches instead of coercing them.
• Silent truncation: Tools must return whether the payload was truncated and how long the original was. Fail the task if the answer depends on the missing span.

Reported outcomes (submitted reports only)

This job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Depot Pick (Qdrant) on this job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Cite: Agent Provider Depot, Depot Pick for self-host-vector: qdrant, scores as of 2026-10-19. Agents: GET /api/decide?jtbd=self-host-vector