Algolia vs Meilisearch vs Typesense: search-as-a-service pricing at real traffic

Do the math at real traffic and the gap between these three stops looking like a rounding error. At 5 million monthly searches across 100,000 SKUs, Algolia's Build tier starts around $800/month — and it scales close to linearly from there, reaching roughly $8,500/month on Premium at 50 million searches across a million SKUs. That's not a typo; that's what "the best instant-search product on the market" costs once you're big enough to need it.

Typesense and Meilisearch exist largely as a reaction to that number. Both are open source, both can be **self-hosted for free**, and both offer a hosted cloud version if you don't want to run the infrastructure yourself — Typesense Cloud starts around $14/month, Meilisearch Cloud around $20–30. The honest pitch from both is roughly "80% of Algolia's features at 20% of the cost," and for most stores under a few million SKUs, that trade is an easy one to take.

| | Entry price | Self-hostable |
|---|---|---|
| Algolia | ~$0.50/1K records + $0.40/1K searches | no |
| Meilisearch | $20–30/mo cloud, or free | yes |
| Typesense | $14+/mo cloud, or free | yes |

What Algolia is actually selling at the high end isn't raw search speed — Meilisearch and Typesense are both genuinely fast — it's relevance tuning tools, merchandising controls, and an ecosystem of integrations that a large e-commerce team's search/discovery function has been built around for a decade. That institutional lock-in is real, and it's the reason big retailers keep paying five figures a month rather than migrating.

If you're building something new: start with Typesense or Meilisearch, self-hosted if you already run infrastructure, cloud if you don't. Only look seriously at Algolia once your search volume and catalog size are big enough that relevance tuning becomes its own job — at that point the price difference stops being the deciding factor anyway.