Compare 4 free search tools, free tiers, and developer deals. Verified pricing for Algolia, Typesense Cloud, Orama, Meilisearch.
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 (44), Headless CMS (15).
We track 4 search services with free tiers. Typesense Cloud leads with 720 hours. This category has been relatively stable — only 3 pricing changes recorded across all vendors.
| Vendor | Tier | Description | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Algolia | Build | Superseded: As of 2026-08-28, algolia.com/pricing reads: There is a free tier with 10K search requests/month and 50K records. The 'Grow' plan includes 10K search requests /month and 100K records. We are not publishing our stored Algolia terms beside it — our own pricing change record, discovered 2026-08-28, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓ | 2026-07-05 |
| 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 vCPU | 2026-07-28 |
| Orama | Free | Full-text, vector, hybrid, and NLP search engine — Free Base plan: 2 included projects, 500 included docs per project (max 5,000 docs/project), 2 indexes per project, unlimited searches, 500 AI sessions/mo, 60-day analytics retention. No credit card required. Extra projects $5/mo, extra indexes $5/mo per 10 | 2026-08-19 |
| Meilisearch | Free OSS | Free OSS (MIT). Instant search engine with typo tolerance, faceted search, filtering, and sorting. Sub-50ms response times. REST API | 2026-07-26 |
| Brave Search API | Credit | $5 prepaid metered credits ($0.003-$0.005 per query depending on endpoint). Web search, news, videos, images, LLM context endpoints. 50 req/sec rate limit. Attribution required. Credit card required, overages billed with no spending cap. Free tier (2,000 queries/mo) eliminated Feb 2026 | 2026-08-19 |
| bonsai.io | Free | Superseded: As of 2026-09-05, bonsai.io/pricing reads: The lowest available plan is 'Staging' at $15/month with 1 GB storage, 256 MB memory, and 100k documents.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, discovered 2026-09-05, names them as the previous ones. Read what we recorded ↓ | 2026-08-23 |
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