Algolia
Algolia
Role
Hosted search for the family's large-corpus sites — oriz-blog,
oriz-books, oriz-book-lore — where Pagefind's build-time index
either inflates the deployed bundle past Cloudflare Pages' static-asset
budget or returns slow first-keystroke results on long lists.
The split is decided per-site: Algolia for big corpora, Pagefind for
the rest. Smaller / static sites (oriz-me, oriz-pdf-tools,
oriz-cards, oriz-finance, oriz-image-tools, oriz-urls-to-md,
oriz-journal, oriz-home) keep Pagefind.
Free tier
- 1,000,000 records stored
- 10,000 searches / month
- Unlimited indexes
- Search analytics + A/B testing on the free tier
- All client SDKs (React InstantSearch, vanilla JS, etc.)
Card / subscription required?
NO. Free-tier sign-up is email-only. No payment method requested, no trial expiry — Algolia has a permanent "Build" free tier.
Alternatives
- Pagefind — primary for small/static sites
- Meilisearch Cloud (free tier exists; smaller doc cap)
- Typesense Cloud (no free tier — paid only)
- ElasticSearch self-hosted (rejected — self-host is rejected family-wide)
Swap cost
Medium — Algolia has its own indexing pipeline + dashboard. Swapping
means rebuilding the index in another tool and re-wiring the
<InstantSearch> client. For the family's big-corpus sites the
React InstantSearch component sits behind a thin wrapper in
@chirag127/oriz-kit, so the swap-surface is small.
Why this is our pick
The most generous no-card-required hosted search. 10K searches/month is plenty for the apex blog + book sites at current traffic, and the 1M doc cap means we don't have to truncate the corpus. Pagefind's build-time approach can't beat Algolia's typo-tolerance + relevance tuning on long-tail book/blog content.
Cross-refs
- Pagefind — small-site sibling
- Never hit quotas rule
- No card-on-file rule