Bonsai

Managed Elasticsearch and OpenSearch on AWS and GCP with flat monthly plans capped by document count, storage and concurrency.

Bonsai's shared Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters cost $20–$400/month, with no per-search fee. Check read/write concurrency as well as document count and disk: a busy site may need a larger plan even if its index is small. Dedicated Business plans start at $600/month. There is no free plan; the $15 Staging tier is for non-production use.

Headquarters: 🇺🇸 United States
Parent jurisdiction: 🇺🇸 United States
EU self-serve plan: Available; check eligible plans and regions
GDPR DPA: Yes
Billing: subscription
Free tier: No free plan; Staging is $15/month for 100k documents (non-production).
Open source: No
Website: bonsai.io
Source last checked: 2026-10-06
Pricing evidence: Modeled rates

Pricing

Published rates converted using workload assumptions. Read the notes. Assumes roughly 1 KB per record and checks document counts, not concurrency. Index overhead, peak traffic and availability can require a larger plan. How to read these estimates.

Plan	Base fee / month
Standard Fir	$20
Standard Elm	$50
Standard Cork	$150
Standard Teak	$250
Standard Oak	$400

Allowances, plan limits & calculation details

Rates are shown at their recorded precision. A zero means no charge in this calculation; the vendor may charge for things we leave out. See the notes for usage assumptions and currency conversions.

Standard Fir

Base fee / month: $20
Included records (thousands): 0
1k additional records / month: $0
Included searches / month (thousands): 0
1k additional searches: $0
Modeled plan limits: ≤ 500 records (thousands)

Standard Elm

Base fee / month: $50
Included records (thousands): 0
1k additional records / month: $0
Included searches / month (thousands): 0
1k additional searches: $0
Modeled plan limits: ≤ 15,000 records (thousands)

Standard Cork

Base fee / month: $150
Included records (thousands): 0
1k additional records / month: $0
Included searches / month (thousands): 0
1k additional searches: $0
Modeled plan limits: ≤ 20,000 records (thousands)

Standard Teak

Base fee / month: $250
Included records (thousands): 0
1k additional records / month: $0
Included searches / month (thousands): 0
1k additional searches: $0
Modeled plan limits: ≤ 25,000 records (thousands)

Standard Oak

Base fee / month: $400
Included records (thousands): 0
1k additional records / month: $0
Included searches / month (thousands): 0
1k additional searches: $0
Modeled plan limits: ≤ 30,000 records (thousands)

Flat monthly plans on shared (multi-tenant) clusters, with no per-search fee. Plans are capped by document count, disk and read/write concurrency: Fir $20 (500k docs, 1 GB disk, 256 MB RAM, 1x/1x), Elm $50 (15M docs, 20 GB, 1 GB RAM, 2x/2x), Cork $150 (20M, 40 GB, 2 GB RAM, 3x/4x), Teak $250 (25M, 70 GB, 3 GB RAM, 5x/6x), Oak $400 (30M, 100 GB, 4 GB RAM). At ~1 KB per record, disk is not the binding limit. Concurrency is, so heavy traffic may need a larger plan than the document count suggests. Staging ($15, 100k docs) is for non-production. Dedicated Business plans start at $600/month, Enterprise at $5,500/month. Shared clusters run in Oregon, Virginia, Ireland, Frankfurt and Sydney. Bonsai is run by One More Cloud, Inc. (US).

Managed alternatives

At 1M records, 5M searches / month. Adjust usage and requirements.

Bonsai: $600/yr estimated.

No cheaper managed estimate matches your filters. Adjust your usage or compare with your actual contract bill.

The price difference leaves out migration costs, operating costs and any features you’d need to replace.

Self-hosted options

Operating cost is not estimated. These options are not counted as savings against managed services.

Want a European-owned provider? See European alternatives to Bonsai among european search providers.

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