Algolia

Hosted keyword search API

Free tier + paidSearch, vector & RAGalgolia.com

What it is

The incumbent hosted search-as-a-service: you push records to an index over an API and get typo-tolerant, sub-50ms keyword search with faceting, synonyms and analytics. Free tier covers 10,000 search requests and 50,000 records per month. Not self-hostable — it is closed SaaS.

Why it earns a slot

InstantSearch UI widgets for React, Vue and vanilla JS mean a working search box in an afternoon, and DocSearch is free for open-source docs sites. Models know its API surface cold.

Know before you commit

Billing is per search request, not per user — an as-you-type box fires a request per keystroke unless you debounce. Costs scale with traffic, fast.

Getting started

npm i algoliasearch react-instantsearch

Field notes

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Pricing snapshot

Free: 10K search requests/mo + 50K records. Grow: $0.50 per 1K searches + $0.40 per 1K records (10K searches / 100K records included). Grow Plus $1.75 per 1K searches. Elevate with NeuralSearch is custom.

Snapshots move fast — verify at checkout, and post a field note if it changed.

Drop into your Lovable chat

Evaluate Algolia (https://www.algolia.com) for this project, then use it only if it fits what we are already building.
Context: Hosted keyword search API. The incumbent hosted search-as-a-service: you push records to an index over an API and get typo-tolerant, sub-50ms keyword search with faceting, synonyms and analytics. Free tier covers 10,000 search requests and 50,000 records per month. Not self-hostable — it is closed SaaS.
Reviewer notes (general, not written for this codebase): InstantSearch UI widgets for React, Vue and vanilla JS mean a working search box in an afternoon, and DocSearch is free for open-source docs sites. Models know its API surface cold.
Watch out for: Billing is per search request, not per user — an as-you-type box fires a request per keystroke unless you debounce. Costs scale with traffic, fast.
Pricing: Free: 10K search requests/mo + 50K records. Grow: $0.50 per 1K searches + $0.40 per 1K records (10K searches / 100K records included). Grow Plus $1.75 per 1K searches. Elevate with NeuralSearch is custom.
Setup: npm i algoliasearch react-instantsearch
Rules: treat the notes above as background only. Do not assume a theme, style, layout or feature that is not already in this project — inspect the existing code first and ask me before changing visual direction.

/api/public/tools/algolia

Neighbourhood

How Algolia sits against the rest of the atlas — swaps, companions and the tools builders actually save alongside it.

Instead of thisFuse.js MiniSearch Pagefind Brave Search API Chroma Cloudflare Vectorize Elastic Cloud Exa

Named in the wiringMeilisearch Typesense

Also in Search, vector & RAG

Brave Search API

brave.com

Independent web index search API

PaidSearch, vector & RAG

$5/month in free credits applied automatically; no standing free query allowance. Search $5 per 1K requests at 50 QPS. Answers $4 per 1K requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 QPS. Enterprise custom.

Open dossier

Chroma

trychroma.com

Embedded vector DB + cloud

Free tier + paidSearch, vector & RAG

OSS free (Apache 2.0). Chroma Cloud Starter: $0/mo base with $5 free credits, then usage. Team $250/mo + usage with $100 credits. Rates: $2.50 per GiB written, $0.33 per GiB-month stored, $0.0075 per TiB queried, $0.09 per GiB returned.

Open dossier

Cloudflare Vectorize

developers.cloudflare.com

Serverless vector DB on Workers

Free tier + paidSearch, vector & RAG

Workers Free: 5M stored vector dimensions, 30M queried dimensions/mo. Workers Paid ($5/mo): 10M stored and 50M queried included, then $0.05 per 100M stored dimensions and $0.01 per million queried dimensions.

Open dossier

Elastic Cloud

elastic.co

Managed Elasticsearch + vector

PaidSearch, vector & RAG

14-day free trial. Cloud Hosted from $99/mo Standard (120GB storage, 2 zones); Gold $114, Platinum $131, Enterprise $184. Serverless from $0.047 per GB retained/mo, $0.09 per search VCU-hour, $0.14 per ingest VCU-hour.

Open dossier