Algolia

Hosted search API with typo-tolerance, faceting, and real-time indexing.

Use Cases

Add instant search to an e-commerce site with faceted filtering by category, price, and rating

Build a documentation search with typo-tolerance that handles misspelled technical terms

Free Tier

10K records, 10K search requests/month, 100K operations/month

How to Maximize the Free Tier

Algolia's free tier (10K records, 10K searches/month) is best for documentation search and small product catalogs. Optimize your record size — smaller records mean more of your 10K record budget goes to actual content. The 10K search requests/month limit is the tighter constraint: implement client-side caching of popular searches to reduce API calls. Use Algolia's dashboard to analyze search patterns before upgrading.

Getting Started

Sign up → create index → push JSON records via API or dashboard → install frontend SDK (`algoliasearch`) → add search box → configure faceting, typo-tolerance, and ranking in dashboard.

Pros

Search quality: Excellent typo-tolerance and relevance ranking — Algolia's search algorithms are best-in-class
Faceted filtering: Powerful faceting with dynamic filtering, sorting, and instant results as users type
Developer API: Simple API to index and search — push JSON, search with a query string, get results in milliseconds

Cons

Record limit: 10,000 records fills quickly for e-commerce catalogs, documentation sites, or content-heavy apps
Search request cap: 10,000 search requests/month is tight for any site with meaningful user traffic or bot crawling
Pricing scaling: Pricing scales aggressively with usage — costs can jump dramatically as your index and traffic grow

Alternatives

TypesenseMeiliSearch