Meilisearch
Open-source search engine with typo tolerance and filters, which you can self-host or run on Meilisearch Cloud.
- Price
- Cloud from $20/month
- Free plan
- No
- Setup
- Needs a developer
- Up and running
- A day for the first version on Cloud; add a day or two to set up your own server with backups.
What Meilisearch is for
Meilisearch is a search engine for your app's search box: fast results as the user types, forgiving typos, with filters. It's open source, so you can run it free on your own server, or pay Meilisearch Cloud to run it for you. The choice is between paying with money (Cloud) or with your time (updates, backups, server).
How it plugs into your product
- 1Choose: start the 14-day Cloud trial (no card) or install it on your own server.
- 2Send your products or content as documents from your backend, and keep them in sync when they change.
- 3Connect the search box in your front end using a search-only key.
- 4Before the trial ends, add a card and pick a Cloud plan; if self-hosting, set up backups and a plan for version updates.
Does it fit your idea?
It fits if
- A SaaS or catalog with up to 100K items and about 50K searches a month, which fits the $30 Cloud plan.
- You already run a VPS and someone on the team is fine handling updates and backups, for search at zero license cost.
- You want Algolia-style search without a per-keystroke bill and with the option to leave the cloud later.
Look elsewhere if
- Nobody on the team will handle servers and you won't pay at least $20 a month in dollars for Cloud.
- You need ready-made UI components and polished merchandising tools today: Algolia has more out of the box.
- Your index is so big that you'll need sharding, and you planned to self-host for free: that feature needs a commercial agreement in production.
What people only find out after building
Read this before you build on it. Each item links to the official page that says so.
Not everything is MIT. Sharding, S3-streaming snapshots and search rule previews are in the Enterprise Edition, which isn't allowed in production without a commercial agreement.
Official source: github.comWhen self-hosting, the database only works with the version that created it. Updating usually works in place, but sometimes it fails at launch and you need to export a dump and re-import.
Official source: meilisearch.comOn Cloud, version updates aren't automatic: you click the update button in the project settings yourself.
Official source: meilisearch.comThe free option is only the 14-day Cloud trial or self-hosting. There's no permanent free cloud plan; Cloud starts at $20 a month in dollars.
Official source: meilisearch.com
Price
Cloud from $20/month
14-day Cloud trial; the Community Edition is free to self-host under the MIT license.
- Free tier
- 14-day trial; free if self-hosted
- First paid plan
- Cloud from $20/month
- Self-host
- Yes, Community Edition (MIT)
Checked on Oct 28, 2026 · official pricing
What it costs in practice
Estimate: 1,000 users × 30 searches a month = 30K searches, with 5K products. That fits the usage-based Cloud example of $30/month (100K documents, 50K searches). A resource-based XS instance (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) plus 32 GiB of disk is about $23/month. Self-hosted, the software is free and you pay only your server.
Estimate from the official price. Check it before you decide.
At a glance
- Free plan: no
- Open source: yes
“Not stated” means the official site doesn’t say.
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