Meilisearch

Meilisearch uses an open-core style distribution model centred on free adoption of its open-source search engine and monetisation through a managed cloud service. The free self-hosted product lowers adoption friction for developers and product teams, while the hosted offer captures recurring revenue from customers that want production-grade infrastructure, scaling, observability, support, and advanced capabilities without operational overhead.

Meilisearch is a French software company that develops an API-first search engine for websites and applications. Its core product is distributed as open-source software for self-hosted deployments, while Meilisearch Cloud provides a managed version with hosted infrastructure, scaling, monitoring, analytics, and enterprise support. The platform is used to build on-site search and discovery features across web and mobile products, including full-text, semantic, vector, hybrid, and conversational retrieval use cases.

The company makes money by converting open-source adoption into paid cloud usage and enterprise-grade service plans. Its direct customers are developers, engineering teams, product teams, startups, and larger enterprises that need search infrastructure without building and maintaining it internally. Relative to broader search infrastructure competitors, Meilisearch positions itself around deployment control, developer usability, and a simplified implementation model.