Meilisearch (self-hosted)
Open-source (MIT community edition) search engine in Rust with typo tolerance, filters and hybrid vector search, run on your own servers.
Running the MIT community edition yourself suits projects that want no per-document or per-search fees and are happy to manage a server. RAM is the thing to size: about 3 times the data size keeps search fast, so a 1M-record catalogue fits on a 2-4 vCPU / 4-8 GB VM, while a 20M-record marketplace needs a 64 GB machine. Sharding and replication are Enterprise edition features under a commercial licence, so scaling beyond one node is not covered by the free build.
- Headquarters
- 🇫🇷 France
- Parent jurisdiction
- 🇫🇷 France
- EU self-serve plan
- Available; check eligible plans and regions
- GDPR DPA
- No / not documented
- Billing
- self-hosted
- Free tier
- Community edition is free and open source.
- Open source
- Yes · self-hostable
- Website
- www.meilisearch.com
- Source last checked
- 2026-10-06
- Pricing evidence
- Operating cost not estimated
Pricing
Operating cost not estimated · servers, licenses and engineering time are yours. See notes for software editions and license terms.
Self-hosted: budget for servers, storage and maintenance. Meilisearch indexes are memory-mapped from disk, so RAM of about 3 times the data size keeps search fast. At ~1 KB per record, a docs site runs on a 1 GB VM, an e-commerce catalogue (1M records) on a 2-4 vCPU / 4-8 GB VM, and a marketplace (20M records, 50M searches/month) on an 8+ vCPU / 64 GB machine with fast SSD. Some features (e.g. sharding, replication) are Enterprise edition under a commercial license. Data stays wherever you run it.
Managed alternatives
At 1M records, 5M searches / month. Adjust usage and requirements.
Meilisearch has no bill to estimate: you pay for the servers, storage and time to run it. The cheapest managed option here is Bonsai at $600/yr, so running Meilisearch yourself saves money only if hosting and upkeep stay below about $50 a month.
- Bonsai: $600/yr estimatedModeled ratesAssumes roughly 1 KB per record and checks document counts, not concurrency. Index overhead, peak traffic and availability can require a larger plan.
- Typesense Cloud: $864/yr estimatedModeled ratesSingle-node cluster with 1 KB records and modeled sizing. Production HA roughly triples cost; EU regions can cost more.
- Amazon OpenSearch Service: $1,063/yr estimatedModeled ratesSingle-node domain sized at 1 KB per record. Multi-zone availability, replicas and peak query load are not modeled.
- Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch): $2,520/yr estimatedModeled ratesUses published example deployments and assumes 1 KB records. Real query load and resource sizing can differ.
- Vespa Cloud: $8,340/yr estimatedPublished rates
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.
Other search comparisons
- Algolia vs Typesense Cloud
- Algolia vs Meilisearch Cloud
- Typesense Cloud vs Meilisearch Cloud
- Algolia vs Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch)
Found a wrong rate or plan restriction? Report a correction with a current source.