A hosted search API with typo-tolerant keyword search and AI ranking.
Best for: Polished instant search with ready-made UI widgets. Skip it if: Search traffic may spike; per-request pricing adds up.
Official hosted MCP servers (Public, Productivity, DevEx); llms.txt.
Build (free)
- 10K search requests/month
- 50K records
- 5K recommendation requests and 5K crawls/month
Free-plan users are asked to show the Algolia logo next to the search box.
An open-source search engine with typo-tolerant keyword, vector and hybrid search, self-hosted or on Meilisearch Cloud.
Best for: Fast, typo-tolerant app search you can self-host for free. Skip it if: You want free managed hosting.
Ships an experimental native MCP server at /mcp; llms.txt.
Self-hosted Community Edition (Cloud: 14-day trial)
- Self-hosted: free, no usage limits
- Cloud: 14-day trial, no credit card
No permanent free Cloud tier, and sharding is Enterprise Edition only (BUSL-1.1).
An open-source JavaScript search library for full-text, vector and hybrid search.
Best for: Client-side or edge search over docs and small catalogs. Skip it if: You need a managed server-side index for large, fast-changing data.
llms.txt; Orama Cloud docs list an MCP server.
Open-source library
- $0 under Apache-2.0
- Full-text, vector and hybrid search
- Runs in browser, server or edge
Orama’s pricing page lists no free hosted search plan, so plan on running the library yourself.
PostgreSQL’s built-in text search using tsvector, tsquery, ranking and indexes.
Best for: Searching data that already lives in Postgres. Skip it if: You need instant, typo-tolerant search-as-you-type.
Plain SQL that coding agents write well; Supabase MCP can run it.
Built into Postgres (works on any free Postgres host)
- No per-search fees
- Supabase Free: 500 MB database
- Neon Free: 1 GB storage and 100 CU-hours per project/month
It matches stemmed words, not typos; fuzzy matching needs pg_trgm and ranking needs hand-tuning.
An open-source, typo-tolerant search engine you can self-host or run on Typesense Cloud.
Best for: Self-hosted instant search on a small VM. Skip it if: You want a permanently free managed tier.
Official Typesense Cloud MCP server (OAuth) for clusters, data and search; llms.txt.
Self-hosted, or Typesense Cloud one-time free tier
- Cloud: 720 cluster-hours + 10 GB bandwidth, once per account
- Cloud free tier on select small configurations only
- Self-hosted: free
Cloud free hours never renew; running clusters start billing once they’re used.