Business Model

There are multiple ways of monetizing around an open-source project. We choose to offer services on top of our open-source edition. Let’s go over the options we have in mind so far.

Open-source

Meilisearch open-source edition will keep an open-source license (opens new window).

Every feature developed for the individual developer will be in the open-source edition. Every integration for any language, any framework will be in the open-source edition.

To achieve our vision of making it easy to find anything anywhere, we want Meilisearch to be an industry standard for building any search feature within an app/website.

Any cloud offering or enterprise edition of Meilisearch cannot be successful if the open-source edition is not successful. Thus the open-source project and its integrations will always be our primary focus.

Since we started building Meilisearch in public, many companies have asked for support or hosting because they do not want to maintain Meilisearch on their side. This is why we developed our paid offering.

Cloud

Meilisearch Cloud is Meilisearch-as-a-service.

We, the developers of Meilisearch, will take care of deploying, hosting, updating & maintaining Meilisearch for the companies willing to pay for it.

The target for this offering is not the individual developer anymore, but the department/person that needs to improve the search experience of its product.

Meilisearch’s champion within a company will not be the same in every company: They can be someone from the tech department who does not want to add a new technology to maintain in their stack; someone from the design department who wants to improve UX on their product; or someone from marketing who wants to increase revenue on each search within their app.

Meilisearch Cloud will have specific features targeted toward those users (e.g., Results promotion, Analytics, Monitoring, Contextual search, etc.).

Enterprise

Some organizations prefer to self-host most of their stack for scalability, privacy, or customization purposes.

Idea stage: Meilisearch enterprise edition will get most of the cloud-specific features available in a public package sold under a proprietary license.

⚠️ We won’t do specific development for specific companies because we do not want to become contractors :).