Use cases / Elasticsearch Serverless alternative
Serverless Elasticsearch that only bills when you search.
Elastic Cloud Serverless keeps a search baseline running and bills it in VCU-hours. WarpSearch answers the Elasticsearch API with no VCUs at all: you pay per request, from $10 a month, and your existing clients, Logstash and Beats connect with a new URL.
- $10a month minimum, vs about $100 to $210 for a small Elasticsearch Serverless search project
- 2 to 6 msmedian keyword search on 2 to 4 CPUs. Elastic publishes 22 to 67 ms p99
- 0 VCUsno baseline and no VCUs per query to estimate. Idle collections cost only their storage
Change the endpoint, keep your code
# before: Elastic Cloud Serverless # es = Elasticsearch("https://my-project.es.us-east-1.aws.elastic.cloud", api_key=...) # after: WarpSearch es = Elasticsearch( "https://api.warpsearch.io/compat/es", headers={"Authorization": "Bearer ws_..."}, ) es.search(index="products", query=query) # unchanged
How fast is it compared with Elasticsearch Serverless?
Elastic publishes p99 latency from its own Rally runs on Serverless, without stating the hardware. Our numbers are medians on 2 to 4 CPUs over different datasets, so treat the comparison as indicative, not like for like.
| WarpSearch | Elastic Serverless | |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword search | 1 to 6 ms median (2.1 ms on 2.8M docs, 2.4 ms on 10M passages) | 35 ms p99 on Rally wikipedia |
| Vector search | 6.2 ms median at 0.964 recall@10 on 10M vectors, 15.7 ms at 1536 dims | 22 ms p99 on BEIR NQ, 1536 dims |
| Time to searchable | Seconds, or immediate with commit=true | 5 seconds by default |
| Idle cost | Storage only | Search keeps a baseline, billed at a reduced idle rate |
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.
Elasticsearch Serverless pricing vs WarpSearch and the other options
Monthly cost at list prices in US East for two common search workloads. Open a platform for the line items and sources.
| Platform | Small RAG | Catalog |
|---|---|---|
| WarpSearch | $10 | $139 |
| Elastic Serverless | About $100 to $21010 to 21x cheaper | $210+1.5x cheaper or more |
| Elastic Cloud | $93 to $2859.3 to 29x cheaper | $516 to $1,5003.7 to 11x cheaper |
| OpenSearch Serverless | $357 to $53036 to 53x cheaper | $550 to $1,0804 to 7.8x cheaper |
| OpenSearch Service | $132 to $39713 to 40x cheaper | $400 to $1,5752.9 to 11x cheaper |
| Aiven | $365 to $73037 to 73x cheaper | $730 to $1,4555.3 to 10x cheaper |
| Pinecone | $118 to $13712 to 14x cheaper | $8,100 to $9,20058 to 66x cheaper |
| turbopuffer | $161.6x cheaper | $536 to $5563.9 to 4x cheaper |
| Small RAG | 1M text chunks with 768-dim embeddings, 7 GB of JSON. 1M queries a month spread through the day. 1 GB written a month. |
|---|---|
| Catalog | 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. |
List prices in US dollars, checked October 20, 2026. Ranges cover regions, plan choices, or how the vendor sizes compute. All comparisons and sources.
Why switching is a no-brainer
- Same API, same clients. The official Elasticsearch clients, Logstash, Filebeat and other Beats, Fluent Bit, Vector and Grafana's Elasticsearch data source connect with a new base URL and an API key header.
- No VCU baseline. Elastic search projects keep a baseline billed around the clock. WarpSearch bills each request, so a quiet app pays the $10 minimum.
- Prices you can predict. A request is a request. Elastic does not publish how many VCUs a query uses, so its bill is hard to estimate before you get it.
- Keyword, vector and hybrid in one index. Top-level
knn, therrfandlinearretrievers, and BM25 queries all work against one collection. - Also speaks OpenSearch and Solr. One endpoint for teams running more than one engine.
- Free to try. Up to 1 GB free, no card, no time limit.
Good to know
Check before you move: WarpSearch has no Kibana, ILM, Watcher or ingest pipelines, and no dynamic mapping, so you create a collection with its mapping first. Highlighting is in development, and scroll, search_after, point in time, nested documents and scripts are not supported. The Elasticsearch compatibility page has the full list.
Migrate from Elasticsearch Serverless in three steps
Create a collection with your mapping
Send your index mapping to the Elasticsearch endpoint, or create the collection in the console. See Elasticsearch compatibility.
Re-index your documents
Bulk-load with
_bulk, Logstash or Beats. See Ingesting documents.Switch the endpoint
Change the URL and send the WarpSearch key in an
Authorizationheader. Queries, aggregations and retrievers stay the same.
Questions
Is Elasticsearch serverless?
Self-managed Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud Hosted run on clusters you size. Elastic Cloud Serverless is Elastic's serverless offering, billed in VCU-hours for search projects. WarpSearch is serverless Elasticsearch-compatible search billed per request instead.
What is the best alternative to Elasticsearch Serverless?
If you want to stop paying for a search baseline, WarpSearch answers the Elasticsearch REST API, so your clients and queries keep working, and bills per GB stored, per GB written and per request, from $10 a month.
How much does Elasticsearch Serverless cost?
Search projects bill $0.14 per ingest VCU-hour and $0.09 per search VCU-hour, plus $0.047 per GB retained. Elastic's own examples put a small project at about $100 to $210 a month. See the Elasticsearch Serverless pricing breakdown.
Does Elasticsearch Serverless scale to zero?
Ingest does. Search keeps a baseline, billed at a reduced idle rate. A WarpSearch collection that nobody queries costs only its storage.
Elastic Cloud Hosted or Serverless?
Hosted means sizing a cluster, from $99 a month. Serverless removes the sizing but bills VCU-hours. WarpSearch removes both. See the Elastic Cloud comparison.
Do Logstash and Beats work?
Yes, with the key in a custom header instead of an Elasticsearch id:api_key pair. The Elasticsearch compatibility page has the settings for each shipper.
Read next
Free up to 1 GB, no card. Pay per GB and per request after that.