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WarpSearch vs Algolia

Hosted keyword search billed per search request and per record. Every keystroke in search-as-you-type is a billable request.

Looking at Algolia pricing, or for an Algolia alternative that does not bill per keystroke? Algolia Grow charges $0.50 per 1,000 search requests; WarpSearch charges $2 per million and adds vector and hybrid search and aggregations on every plan. Below is what Algolia costs for real workloads, line by line, next to WarpSearch.

The scoreboard

Price

Cheaper on all 1 workloads Algolia can run

Catalog194x cheaper

WarpSearch$139

Algolia$26,955

Monthly, list prices. Bars are drawn to the middle of a range.

How they bill

	WarpSearch	Algolia
Billing unit	Flat $2 per million requests	$0.50 per 1,000 search requests on Grow, $1.75 on Grow Plus; each keystroke is a request
Storage	$0.08 per GB-month, lower at volume	$0.40 per 1,000 records a month above 100,000; replicas count as records
Writes	$1.00 per GB	Not billed separately
Minimum	$10 a month	$0 on Grow and Grow Plus; Elevate is an annual contract
Size limit	None per collection	100 GB per application, one application, 10 KB average record
Vector search	Yes, on every plan, with your own embeddings	NeuralSearch on Elevate only; no documented way to bring your own embeddings
Aggregations and facets	Yes	Facets and numeric facet stats; no histograms or nested aggregations

What Algolia cannot do, or does only in part: Grow and Grow Plus are keyword search only, capped at 100 GB per application and one application. Semantic search (NeuralSearch) is on Elevate only, with an annual contract and custom pricing. Facets, but no histograms or nested aggregations.

Price

Monthly cost at list prices in US East.

5M products with 384-dim embeddings, 10 GB of JSON. 50M queries a month (about 19 a second on average). 20 GB written a month.

	WarpSearch	Algolia
Storage	$0.60 (7.5 GB held x $0.08)	$1,960 (4.9M records x $0.40/1K)
Writes	$20 (20 GB x $1.00)	Not billed
Search	$100 (50M requests)	$24,995 (49.99M requests x $0.50/1K)
Data returned	$18 (250 GB returned, 100 GB free, before compression)	Not billed
Minimum	Cleared	None
Total a month	$139	$26,955

Keyword only: the 384-dim embeddings are not searchable on Grow. Counts one request per query; search-as-you-type sends one per keystroke and multiplies this. Grow Plus: about $89,443.

Performance

Test	Result
Keyword search, 2.8M docs (LoTTE)	2.1 ms median, 3,700 queries/s
Keyword search, 10M passages (MS MARCO v2)	2.4 ms median (5.4 ms with an exact total hit count)
Keyword search, small BEIR sets	1 to 6 ms median
Vector search, 10M x 128-dim (BigANN SIFT)	0.964 recall@10 at 6.2 ms median, 162 queries/s
Vector search, 1M x 1536-dim (arXiv)	0.961 recall@10 at 15.7 ms median
Filtered vector search, 10M (YFCC)	0.959 recall@10 at 10.4 ms median
Log filters, 22M events (http_logs)	1 to 2 ms median
Log aggregations, 22M events	190 to 430 ms median (sort, daily histogram, avg by status)
Ingest, short text	63,000 to 97,000 docs/s
Ingest, logs (247M events)	76,000 to 81,000 events/s
Ingest, 768 to 1536-dim vectors	2,200 to 4,000 vectors/s
Time to searchable	Seconds, or immediate with commit=true
Cold start	Not measured yet. First query on a 2.3 GB index: 17 to 19 ms vs 2.7 ms warm (page cache only)

Measured October 2026 through our Elasticsearch-compatible API, warm cache, client in the same region, single runs. Every test ran on deliberately minimal hardware, 2 to 4 CPUs (a 4 CPU container or an AWS i8g.large with 2 vCPUs), so these are the least favorable results we can produce. More hardware only improves them. Numbers exclude internet round trips.

Bottom line

Choose WarpSearch for

Price per request: $2 per million against $500 per million on Grow, 250x lower.
Catalog: $139 against about $26,955 a month, and ours includes vector search.
Vector, hybrid search and aggregations on every plan, with your own embeddings and no 100 GB cap.

For product and site search at volume, WarpSearch is about 190x cheaper than Algolia Grow and adds vector search without an Elevate contract.

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Questions

How much does Algolia cost?

Grow is $0 a month with 10,000 search requests and 100,000 records included, then $0.50 per 1,000 requests and $0.40 per 1,000 records. Grow Plus raises search to $1.75 per 1,000. Elevate is custom, on an annual contract. A 5M-product catalog with 50M queries a month comes to about $26,955 on Grow, against $139 on WarpSearch.

Is Algolia worth it?

Algolia is fast, hosted keyword search with merchandising tools such as Rules, and AI Ranking on Grow Plus. The cost grows with every request: 50M searches a month is about $25,000 on Grow before records. If you need semantic search, that means Elevate and a custom annual contract.

Is Algolia better than Elasticsearch?

They solve different problems. Algolia is a hosted keyword search API, billed per request, with 100 GB per application on Grow. Elasticsearch adds vector search, aggregations and log analytics, but you run or size a cluster. WarpSearch answers the Elasticsearch API with no cluster and bills $2 per million requests.

Who are Algolia's main competitors?

Elasticsearch and OpenSearch (self-run or managed), Typesense and Meilisearch for site search, and vector databases such as Pinecone for semantic search. WarpSearch covers keyword, vector and hybrid search in one index. See all comparisons.

Does Algolia have vector search?

Only through NeuralSearch, which is listed on the Elevate plan alone. Grow Plus adds AI Ranking, AI Synonyms and Query Categorization, not NeuralSearch. Algolia documents no way to search embeddings you bring yourself.

Sources

Algolia calls its calculator directional, not a quote. Hosting is US, UK or EU West on Grow, with no regional price difference listed. Search-as-you-type sends a request per keystroke, so real Algolia bills for the same traffic can be several times higher. Prices checked October 20, 2026. List prices in US dollars, before discounts. Estimates are marked. Tell us if something is out of date: contact us.