Every free search tier that clears our bar in 2026: 1 offer meets the criteria and 3 offers are demoted with a named reason. Recorded changes and a published ranking method. We could not confirm today's terms for 2 of them: on 1 the page we cite did not answer, and on 1 our own read did not confirm them. Each row says why.
Search-as-a-service. The Free plan needs no credit card and includes 10K search requests/month, 50K records, 5K recommendation requests/month, 5K crawls/month and 1 application, with some features reserved for paid plans. Grow is pay as you go: 10K search requests and 100K records a month included, then $0.50 per 1K search requests and $0.40 per 1K records. Note — 2026-08-12: Algolia replaced its Build plan with a Free plan between the pricing-page captures of 2026-08-10 and 2026-08-13; its Free Plan terms carry a new version from 2026-08-12. The free plan went from 1M records to 50K, and from 10K to 5K recommendation requests and 5K crawls a month; search requests stay at 10K a month. Source ↗
Free OSS (MIT). Instant search engine with typo tolerance, faceted search, filtering, and sorting. Sub-50ms response times. REST API. When we last read the page we cite for this offer, on 2026-11-01, we could read no amount, tier or rate on the page, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Superseded: As of 2026-09-05, bonsai.io/pricing reads: The lowest available plan is 'Staging' at $15/month with 1 GB storage, 256 MB memory, and 100k documents. We are not publishing our stored bonsai.io terms beside it — our own pricing change record, effective between 2026-03-12 and 2026-07-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓ Note — effective between 2026-03-12 and 2026-07-28: The free tier no longer exists. The lowest tier is now a 'Staging' plan at $15/month with 1 GB storage and 256 MB memory. Source ↗
One-time free credit: 720 hours cluster runtime + 10 GB bandwidth (does not replenish). Smallest node: 0.5 GB RAM / 2 vCPU. The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-10-09, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
| Vendor | Free Tier | Key Limits | Durability | Read / catalogue date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Algolia | Free | Search-as-a-service. The Free plan needs no credit card and includes 10K search requests/month, 50K records, 5K recommen... | watch effective 2026-08-12 |
2026-11-09 |
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 1 free search offers that clear our bar, each listed with the terms we publish and the date we last read them. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
1 offer meets our criteria for this category. It carries a recorded narrowing to the terms we publish. The Durability column below says which offer is in which group, and links the dated record behind every change. We do not rank these by how much you get, because the limits are not comparable without reading each vendor's page.