Best Search API · FREE
Best free Search API (2026)
5 search api that offer a genuine free plan, ranked by entry price. Every figure links to the public page it was captured from — the vendor's own wherever the vendor publishes the number, otherwise the named public source — with the date we captured it.
Key takeaways
- Cheapest: Algolia at $0/mo.
- Qualifying: Algolia, MongoDB Atlas Search, Pinecone, Typesense Cloud, Weaviate.
- Data current through: 2026-11-01. STALE marks a row whose price we have not re-checked at its source in over 30 days; a vendor with no published price is marked when any of its plans is. 3 of 5 rows below are marked.
Comparison
| # | Search API | Entry price | Free | HIPAA | SOC 2 | Best for | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Algolia STALE · 2026-06-14 | $0/mo | Yes | — | — | E-commerce product discovery at scale | algolia.com |
| 2 | MongoDB Atlas Search STALE · 2026-09-27 | $0/mo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Teams already on MongoDB Atlas wanting embedded search without a separate service | mongodb.com |
| 3 | Pinecone | $0/mo | Yes | Yes | Yes | RAG pipelines and AI agent memory stores | pinecone.io |
| 4 | Typesense Cloud STALE · 2026-09-03 | $0/mo | No | Yes | Yes | Developer teams wanting open-source flexibility with a managed cloud option | cloud.typesense.org |
| 5 | Weaviate | $0/mo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Teams building AI-native applications with multi-tenancy requirements | weaviate.io |