Best free tier for search

Managed, hosted search-as-a-service with a forever-free Community plan: 10,000 search requests/month and 10,000 records. Sub-100ms global edge search, typo-tolerance, and React InstantSearch UI libraries.

Bandwidth

n/a

Requests

10k search requests/month + 10k records

Paid from

$1/mo

Open-source search engine (GPLv3) you can self-host with unlimited records; Typesense Cloud offers a 14-day free trial, then paid hosted plans. Fast, typo-tolerant, and tunable relevance.

Bandwidth

n/a

Requests

unlimited on self-hosted; Typesense Cloud has a 14-day trial (no forever-free)

Paid from

$9/mo

Serverless Postgres with built-in full-text search + file attachments; branches like git.

Bandwidth

included

Requests

15 GB storage, 15 branch-hours/day, 1M API rows/month

Paid from

$50/mo

Open-source search engine (MIT) you can self-host with unlimited documents and queries; Meilisearch Cloud no longer offers a forever-free tier (free trial only). Sub-50ms typo-tolerant search.

Bandwidth

n/a

Requests

unlimited on self-hosted; Meilisearch Cloud free tier deprecated

Paid from

$30/mo

Elastic App Search is a managed search-product layer over Elasticsearch — no forever-free cloud tier (14-day trial). Self-host the open-source Elasticsearch distribution (Apache 2.0 / SSPL) for unlimited free on-prem search, analytics, and relevance tuning.

Bandwidth

n/a

Requests

14-day trial; free self-hosted via the open-source Elasticsearch distribution

Paid from

$95/mo