Best free tier for self-hosted

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

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

Open-source Node.js headless CMS — fully free to self-host; Strapi Cloud has a 14-day trial then paid, no forever-free cloud tier.

Bandwidth

n/a

Requests

Open-source self-host free (MIT); Strapi Cloud 14-day trial

Paid from

$15/mo

TypeScript-first headless CMS — open-source and fully free to self-host with Next.js; Payload Cloud has a trial, no forever-free cloud tier.

Bandwidth

n/a

Requests

Open-source self-host free (MIT); Payload Cloud trial

Paid from

$35/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