Typesense Has a Free API — Search That Just Works

Typesense is an open-source search engine built for speed and simplicity. It is like Algolia but free, self-hosted, and incredibly easy to set up.

What Is Typesense?

Typesense is a typo-tolerant search engine optimized for instant search experiences. Written in C++, it is blazing fast.

Typesense Cloud free tier:

• 250K documents
• 250K searches/month
• 28-day free trial, then pay-as-you-go

Quick Start

docker run -p 8108:8108 \
  -v /tmp/typesense-data:/data \
  typesense/typesense:27.1 \
  --data-dir /data --api-key=xyz

REST API

# Create collection
curl -X POST http://localhost:8108/collections \
  -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: xyz" \
  -d '{"name":"products","fields":[{"name":"title","type":"string"},{"name":"price","type":"float"},{"name":"category","type":"string","facet":true}]}'

# Add document
curl -X POST http://localhost:8108/collections/products/documents \
  -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: xyz" \
  -d '{"title":"MacBook Pro","price":1999.99,"category":"Laptops"}'

# Search
curl "http://localhost:8108/collections/products/documents/search?q=macbok&query_by=title" \
  -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: xyz"

Use Cases

1. Instant search — sub-50ms results
2. E-commerce — product search with facets
3. Geo-search — find nearby locations
4. Semantic search — vector search support
5. Autocomplete — search suggestions

Typesense vs Alternatives

Feature	Typesense	Meilisearch	Algolia
Language	C++	Rust	Cloud
Geo-search	Yes	Yes	Yes
Vector search	Yes	No	Yes
Clustering	Yes	No	Cloud
Price	Free/OSS	Free/OSS	Paid

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