Algolia

Algolia is a hosted search API. You push your records to it and it returns typo-tolerant, ranked results in milliseconds, with libraries for most frameworks. E-commerce sites, documentation portals and SaaS products with in-app search use it. The Free plan is the developer tier: 10,000 search requests a month and up to 50,000 records, permanently.

What the free plan gives you

• 10,000 search requests a month
• 50,000 records
• 20 indices per application
• 10 rules per index
• 7 days of analytics retention
• Keyword search with the full InstantSearch UI libraries
• Community Discord and documentation support

For a personal site, a docs search or a small catalogue this is plenty. Ten thousand queries a month is roughly 330 searches a day.

Where the free plan stops

• 10,000 requests a month. A modest public site with search in the header can pass this.
• 50,000 records, which a large product catalogue or a big content archive will exceed.
• 7 days of analytics and 10 rules per index, so no long-term query reporting and little room for merchandising rules.

There is no fixed monthly fee for the next step. The Grow plan is pay as you go: 10,000 requests and 100,000 records are included, then $0.50 per additional 1,000 requests and $0.40 per additional 1,000 records, with 30-day analytics. Grow Plus at $1.75 per extra 1,000 requests adds AI ranking, personalisation and 90-day analytics. Elevate is an annual contract with NeuralSearch and enterprise support.

Who it suits

Use the Free plan for documentation search, a portfolio site or an MVP where search traffic is light. Once you are a real store or a content site with steady traffic, budget for Grow, where costs scale with usage rather than jumping to a large flat fee.