by Meilisearch (Meili SAS)Search APIs
Hosted open-source search billed by searches and documents, or by instance size, from about $20 a month.
Hosted open-source search with a choice of billing: pay per search and document, or a fixed instance price from about $20 a month.
Meilisearch Cloud lets each project pick its billing model: usage-based Build for $30 a month with 50,000 searches and 100,000 documents, or a resource-based instance that costs the same however many searches it serves. The pricing page’s estimator recommends a size from your document count, document size and searches. Hybrid and semantic search work with embedding providers such as OpenAI, Cohere and Mistral, and the engine is open source.
Against 3 other products we reviewed in Search APIs: what you pay for with each, the five access facts, the plan limits we recorded and each review's bottom line. The note under the table says how each one was checked.
| Metric | Meilisearch Cloud | Elastic Cloud | Amazon OpenSearch Service | Typesense Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you're paying for | Easy to adoptHosted open-source search with a choice of billing: pay per search and document, or a fixed instance price from about $20 a month. | Saves engineering timeManaged Elasticsearch with vector, semantic and hybrid search from $0.0282 an hour, with SOC 2, ISO 27001 and a HIPAA BAA on every tier. | Compliance includedManaged OpenSearch in your AWS account from $0.036 an hour, with searches unbilled and AWS SOC reports and a HIPAA BAA self-serve. | Worth the priceA dedicated, managed cluster of open-source search from $21.60 a month, with no per-search or per-record charges. |
| Overall score | 6.2 | 8.0Best | 7.7 | 7.6 |
| Free option | 14-day free trial | 14-day free trial | Free trial | Free trial |
| Card to start | No card needed | No card needed | –Not measured | –Not measured |
| Getting access | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve | Self-serve |
| Starter priceCheapest paid plan | $20/mo | $0.0282/hour | $0.036/hour | $21.60/mo |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based | Usage-based |
| Pricing page | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices | Public prices |
| Billing units | Instance hours, disk and bandwidth; or searches and documents | RAM-hours, data transfer and snapshot storage (Hosted); compute units and storage (Serverless) | Instance hours, EBS storage and data transfer; or compute units and storage (Serverless) | Cluster hours (RAM and vCPU) and outbound bandwidth |
| Free option | 14-day trial, no card | 14-day trial, no card | AWS Free Tier credits for new accounts, not specific to OpenSearch | 720 cluster hours and 10 GB once per account |
| 100,000 records, 500,000 searches/mo | $23 (XS, estimator); $210 usage-based | $20.59 (Hosted, 1 GB, one zone); $41.17 in two zones | $27.50 (t3.small.search, one node) | $21.60 (0.5 GB, one node); $64.80 with high availability |
| Vector or hybrid search | Documented for the engine, no plan limit stated | Every level; semantic models and reranking on Serverless and higher Hosted levels | Every domain (k-NN, neural and hybrid search) | Every cluster |
| SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II | Both | Both (AWS reports in AWS Artifact) | SOC 2 Type II (report with Business support) |
| HIPAA BAA | Not stated | Every subscription tier | Self-serve in AWS Artifact | With the Business support plan ($400 per 28 days) |
| EU hosting | Yes, Frankfurt and Paris | Yes, incl. Frankfurt and Ireland on AWS, Azure and GCP | Yes, AWS EU Regions incl. Frankfurt, Ireland and Paris | Yes, 6 EU locations incl. Frankfurt and Paris, same price as the US |
| SAML SSO | Enterprise | Serverless, no extra cost; Hosted on Enterprise | IAM Identity Center at no extra charge; SAML for OpenSearch Dashboards | Every account, no extra charge |
| Open-source engine | Yes, MIT (Enterprise Edition parts under BUSL) | Yes, AGPLv3 option (also SSPL and Elastic License) | Yes, OpenSearch (Apache 2.0) | Yes, GPL-3.0 |
| Bottom line | From its public pages, Meilisearch Cloud gives the most billing flexibility here and a low resource-based price at our scenario. Check the instance size against the docs’ tier table, and plan on Enterprise for SSO. | From its public pages, Elastic Cloud offers the most AI search and compliance here on self-serve terms and the lowest Hosted price at our scenario. Pricing has more settings than the others, and SSO and some AI features depend on the Hosted level or on using Serverless. | From its public pages, Amazon OpenSearch Service includes compliance, SSO and an Apache 2.0 engine on self-serve terms, and searches are not billed on a domain. You size the domain yourself, and the bill has more lines than a cluster price. | From its public pages, Typesense Cloud is the cheapest here at our scenario and includes the most on a self-serve plan: vector search, SAML SSO and an open-source engine. You size the cluster, and compliance documents need a support plan. |
Evidence: Meilisearch Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Elastic Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Amazon OpenSearch Service: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run; Typesense Cloud: facts checked 2026-10-15 from its public sign-up and pricing pages, no completed hands-on run. Prices in USD as listed, excluding tax. "–" means not recorded.
Review from public pages
Written from Meilisearch Cloud's public pages (pricing, security or privacy, and docs) as read on Oct 15, 2026. We did not sign up, and no hands-on run is published yet.
We read Meilisearch's pricing page, its cost estimator and server sizes, the billing, region, team and search docs, and its trust center on Oct 15, 2026; we did not sign up for this review. The pricing page says Cloud starts at $20 a month with a 14-day trial and no card, and offers usage-based or resource-based billing per project.
The estimator takes documents, searches and document size and shows both models. For 100,000 documents of 1 KB and 500,000 searches, it shows $210 a month usage-based ($30 plus 450 × $0.40) and $23 resource-based, on an XS instance (0.5 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) with 32 GiB of disk. The docs size things more cautiously: index size is about five times the raw data, XS is listed for development and testing, S holds about 80,000 small documents and M about 160,000. By that table our scenario needs M, $69.48 a month in Frankfurt plus disk.
The trust center lists a SOC 2 Type 2 report and GDPR. Data can stay in the EU in Frankfurt or Paris, and the region cannot be changed after a project is created. The SSO docs say SAML SSO is an enterprise feature.
Start on usage-based Build with nothing to size, or run a resource-based instance whose price does not change with traffic.
vs Typesense Cloud: Algolia bills only by usage; Typesense Cloud only by cluster size.
The pricing page computes the usage-based and resource-based cost from your documents, searches and document size.
OpenAI, Cohere, Mistral, Gemini, Voyage, Bedrock, Cloudflare and any REST API, or your own vectors.
vs Algolia: Algolia lists NeuralSearch on Elevate only.
The billing docs say adding team members does not affect the bill.
The pricing page says Meilisearch is open source under the MIT license and can be self-hosted with no usage limits.
The estimator picks XS for 100,000 small documents; the docs list XS for development and testing and S for up to about 80,000 small documents.
Workaround: Tiers can be changed at any time from the project settings, per the docs.
The SSO docs say SAML SSO is not available on non-enterprise Cloud plans; the pricing page lists analytics, merchandising, personalization and chat on Enterprise.
Cloud has a 14-day trial without a card; self-hosting is the free option.
The trust center lists a SOC 2 Type 2 report and GDPR.
Usage-based Build is $30 a month, charged up front, with 50,000 searches and 100,000 documents; extra searches cost $0.40 per 1,000 and extra documents $0.30 per 1,000, billed at the end of the cycle. Resource-based instances are billed hourly by tier (XS $17.73 a month in Frankfurt, $14.40 in Oregon; S $34.98; M $69.48), plus disk with a 32 GB minimum and bandwidth at $0.15 per GB.
For 100,000 records and 500,000 searches a month: $210 usage-based, $23 on XS per the estimator, or about $74.76 on M ($69.48 plus 32 GiB at $0.165) if you follow the docs’ tier table. Tiers of 2XL and above, SSO and dedicated resources go through sales.
The docs describe an export endpoint that sends documents and settings to another Meilisearch instance, and dumps. The engine is open source; per the repository license, most of it is MIT and files marked Enterprise Edition are under the Business Source License.
From its public pages, Meilisearch Cloud gives the most billing flexibility here and a low resource-based price at our scenario. Check the instance size against the docs’ tier table, and plan on Enterprise for SSO.
| Limit | As recorded |
|---|---|
| Billing units | Instance hours, disk and bandwidth; or searches and documents |
| Free option | 14-day trial, no card |
| 100,000 records, 500,000 searches/mo | $23 (XS, estimator); $210 usage-based |
| Vector or hybrid search | Documented for the engine, no plan limit stated |
| SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | SOC 2 Type II |
| HIPAA BAA | Not stated |
| EU hosting | Yes, Frankfurt and Paris |
| SAML SSO | Enterprise |
| Open-source engine | Yes, MIT (Enterprise Edition parts under BUSL) |
Read from the vendor's public pages on Oct 15, 2026. No hands-on run is published yet. How we check
We have not published a sign-up run for Meilisearch Cloud yet. The access facts above were read from its sign-up and pricing pages on Oct 15, 2026.
We have not published API calls for Meilisearch Cloud yet.
Meilisearch Cloud lists 5 plans. The cheapest paid plan, Cloud, costs $20/mo.
Prices as listed, USD, excluding tax; observed 2026-10-15.
Source: meilisearch.com pricing page. Prices change; the observed date above is when our agent read them.
We read the pricing, security and docs pages of three hosted search APIs on the same day and scored them on the same six indicators. How each one bills, what 100,000 records and 500,000 searches a month cost, and who should pick which.
