Chroma, the company behind the popular open-source ChromaDB vector database, has signed a definitive agreement to join Replit. The two firms want to build a context layer that gives AI agents access to what an organisation knows. The hosted Chroma Cloud service will stop accepting writes on 22 November and shut down completely on 22 December. Open-source ChromaDB continues under the Apache 2.0 licence with about 6 million downloads a month, and Chroma has added previously private code to the open repository.

What it means: Many Greek teams that built chatbots or search over internal documents with RAG use ChromaDB, either locally or through the hosted service. Those on Chroma Cloud now face a firm timetable: by 22 November they must have moved any workloads that write data, and by 22 December they must have exported and checked all their content. Moving to self-hosted ChromaDB or to another store such as pgvector on PostgreSQL means retesting search quality, embeddings and cost, so it should not be left to the final week. Access keys also need rotating after the move. The news carries a wider message for anyone choosing AI suppliers: small infrastructure companies get acquired quickly, and new owners often close cloud services to focus on their own products. The practical defence is to favour tools with an open licence and standard export formats, keep regular copies of your data and have a written exit plan before signing any subscription. For client contracts, it is worth checking whether the infrastructure change has to be notified as a change of sub-processor under the GDPR.

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