European search providers
3 of the 11 search services we track have a parent company in Europe: Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch), Meilisearch Cloud and Vespa Cloud. At 1M records, 5M searches / month, the lowest European estimate is $2,520/yr for Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch), against $600/yr for the cheapest US-owned option, Bonsai. All of them offer EU data residency on a self-serve plan.
The median estimate is $8,340/yr across European services and $964/yr across US-owned ones, at the same usage.
“European” means the ultimate parent company is in the EU/EEA, the UK or Switzerland. That describes ownership, not where your data is stored or every law that applies. How we define jurisdiction.
European search services by estimated bill
| Service | Parent company in | EU residency (self-serve) | Est. yearly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)Managed Elasticsearch from Elastic. Serverless projects bill per VCU-hour of search and ingest compute plus GB stored; hosted clusters bill by size. | 🇳🇱 Netherlands | Yes | $2,520/yrServerless, production (about 20 GB data) · $0 records + $0 searchesModeled rates |
| Vespa CloudManaged Vespa, the open-source big-data search and ranking engine spun out of Yahoo. Billed per vCPU, memory and disk hour. | 🇳🇴 Norway | Yes | $8,340/yrBasic, minimal production (2 container + 2 content nodes, 8 GB) · $0 records + $0 searchesPublished rates |
| Meilisearch CloudManaged Meilisearch from Paris-based Meili. Choose usage-based billing (per document and search) or resource-based instances. | 🇫🇷 France | Yes | $27,360/yrUsage-based · $270 records + $1,980 searchesModeled rates |
At 1M records, 5M searches / month. Resource-priced vendors (billed by RAM/cluster) are mapped to the smallest plan that fits; see notes. Sources last checked 2026-10-06. Change the usage to see bills for your workload.
European alternatives to US services
- Algolia ($34,260/yr): Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch) is estimated at $2,520/yr, $31,740/yr less. Compare them.
- Typesense Cloud ($864/yr): no European service in our data is cheaper at this usage. The lowest is Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch) at $2,520/yr.
- Amazon OpenSearch Service ($1,063/yr): no European service in our data is cheaper at this usage. The lowest is Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch) at $2,520/yr.
- Bonsai ($600/yr): no European service in our data is cheaper at this usage. The lowest is Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch) at $2,520/yr.
Bills leave out features, performance, support and migration work. Check the provider notes before you switch.
US-owned services with EU data residency
These offer EU data residency on a self-serve plan, but their parent company is in the US.
- Algolia — Hosted search-as-a-service billed per search request and per stored record. Pay-as-you-go Grow plan; enterprise features need an Elevate contract.
- Amazon OpenSearch Service — AWS-managed OpenSearch (open-source Elasticsearch fork). Provisioned domains bill per instance-hour plus EBS storage; Serverless bills per OCU-hour.
- Bonsai — Managed Elasticsearch and OpenSearch on AWS and GCP with flat monthly plans capped by document count, storage and concurrency.
- Typesense Cloud — Managed clusters of the open-source Typesense engine, billed hourly by RAM and vCPU with no per-search or per-record fees.