Search services compared: free tiers and pricing
6 search services, each with its free tier and lowest paid price as read from its pricing page.
| Service | Free tier | Lowest paid price | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Algolia | Free: 10K search requests and 50K records a month | Grow: $0.50 per 1K searches past 10K; $0.40 per 1K records past 100K | 2026-10-23 |
| Elastic Cloud | Free trial | Standard as low as $99/mo | 2026-10-25 |
| Meilisearch Cloud | 14-day free trial, no card | Usage-based $30/mo base (100K documents, 50K searches); resource-based from $20/mo | 2026-10-23 |
| Orama | — | $0.0015 per vCPU-minute; $0.04 per GiB-month stored | 2026-10-25 |
| Perplexity API | — | $5 per 1,000 requests ($1 per 1,000 with Fast Search) | 2026-10-23 |
| Typesense Cloud | Free cluster: first 720 hours and 10 GB bandwidth | From $0.03/hour (about $21.60/mo) for the smallest cluster | 2026-10-23 |

