Compare 3 free search tools, free tiers, and developer deals. 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. Nothing on record contradicts our terms for Algolia.
What this name holds: Search indexes queried by relevance rather than by key.
2 other names here answer “where do I put the data and query it”, and each holds a different list: Databases (45), Headless CMS (15).
We track 3 search services with a free tier we hold as current and 2 without. This category has been relatively stable — only 2 pricing changes recorded across all vendors.
| Vendor | Tier | Description | 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 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. | 2026-11-09 |
| Typesense Cloud | Free Credit | One-time free credit: 720 hours cluster runtime + 10 GB bandwidth (does not replenish). Smallest node: 0.5 GB RAM / 2 vCPUThe 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. | 2026-10-09 / 2026-07-28 |
| Orama | Retired | There is no free tier. orama.com/pricing, read 2026-10-12, redirects to a contact-sales form for Metis, Orama's enterprise AI platform, and Orama's terms (last updated 2026-09-14) say plans bought online have no free trial and carry a base fee, refundable within 30 days of the first payment. OramaJS, Orama's open-source full-text, vector and hybrid search library, is free under Apache 2.0 and runs in the browser, on a server or at the edge. | 2026-10-12 |
| Meilisearch | Free OSS | Free OSS (MIT). Instant search engine with typo tolerance, faceted search, filtering, and sorting. Sub-50ms response times. REST APIWhen 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. | 2026-11-01 / 2026-07-26 |
| bonsai.io | Free | Superseded: As of 2026-09-05, bonsai.io/pricing reads: The lowest available plan is 'Staging' at $15/month with 1 GB storage, 256 MB memory, and 100k documents.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 ↓ | 2026-11-06 / 2026-08-23 |