Pricing
Simple, predictable pricing.
Free to start. Scale when you need to. Bring your own engine on any plan: your search index stays in your own cluster.
Beta pricing. We may adjust prices as we learn; you get 30 days' notice by email first.
Free
$0a month
For side projects and prototypes
- Every engine, one of each, smallest size
- 100 MB of stored data
- 25,000 searches a month
- Always-warm RAM: none
- 1 project
- 5 branches per project, main included
- Rate limit: 5 searches a second (bursts of 20), 1 write a second
- All 4 engines (hosted Typesense, Elasticsearch and Visor in early access) + Bring Your Own Engine
- Search analytics
- MCP server for agents
- Community support
Starter
$12a month
For a small production app
- Every engine, as many as you need
- 250 MB of stored data
- 250,000 searches a month
- Always-warm RAM: 512 MiB
- 3 projects
- 15 branches per project, main included
- Rate limit: 25 searches a second (bursts of 100), 5 writes a second
- All 4 engines (hosted Typesense, Elasticsearch and Visor in early access) + Bring Your Own Engine
- Search analytics
- MCP server for agents
- Email support, first response within 1 business day
Pro
Most popular$69a month
For growing products
- Every engine, as many as you need
- 2 GB of stored data
- 2M searches a month
- Always-warm RAM: 4 GiB
- 10 projects
- 50 branches per project, main included
- Rate limit: 100 searches a second (bursts of 400), 20 writes a second
- All 4 engines (hosted Typesense, Elasticsearch and Visor in early access) + Bring Your Own Engine
- Search analytics
- MCP server for agents
- Email support, first response within 1 business day
Scale
$249a month
For busy production search
- Every engine, as many as you need
- 10 GB of stored data
- 20M searches a month
- Always-warm RAM: 16 GiB
- Unlimited projects
- 200 branches per project, main included
- Rate limit: 500 searches a second (bursts of 2,000), 50 writes a second
- All 4 engines (hosted Typesense, Elasticsearch and Visor in early access) + Bring Your Own Engine
- Search analytics
- MCP server for agents
- Priority support, first response within 4 business hours
Every plan includes all 4 engines, Free included, plus Bring Your Own Engine, search analytics and the MCP server. Hosted Typesense, Elasticsearch and Visor run on dedicated engines, which are in early access. Free runs one engine of each type, each at its smallest size. Bring Your Own Engine takes Meilisearch, Typesense or Elasticsearch; Visor is run by Headband only. Free stops at its limits; paid plans keep serving and bill what goes over. On a paid plan, an always-on Meilisearch or Elasticsearch engine on bucket storage normally also keeps a live read-only copy on our other server, which answers its searches if its server fails. See Service levels.
Usage above what your plan includes
| Starter | Pro | Scale | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stored data, per GB a month | $50 | $40 | $30 |
| Searches, per 1,000 | $0.03 | $0.02 | $0.01 |
| Always-warm RAM, per GiB a month | $18 | $15 | $12 |
Always-warm engines are billed by RAM only, so their searches and stored data are not billed on top.
Two kinds of engine
- Sleeping (the default)
- Parks when idle and wakes on the next search. You pay for stored data and searches.
- Always-warm
- Never parks. You pay for its RAM, and its searches and storage are included. Best for busy production search.Dedicated engines are in early access. Request early access
What more RAM buys you
Meilisearch
RAM is what makes Meilisearch fast: it reads its index from disk through memory. At 1M documents, 8 GB served 12 times the searches of 2 GB, and almost 6 times those of 4 GB with the same 6 CPUs. 1M documents do not fit in 1 GB, because the index needs about 9 GiB of disk and the 1 GB size allows 8 GiB.
| Size | 1M docs | p95 | 100K docs | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 512 MB | 320 | 82 ms | ||
| 1 GB | Does not fit | 2,562 | 1.9 ms | |
| 2 GB | 143 | 72 ms | 4,302 | 1.4 ms |
| 4 GB | 308 | 28 ms | ||
| 8 GB | 1,799 | 6.2 ms |
Typesense
More RAM does not make Typesense faster once its index fits. At 1M documents, 2 GB and 4 GB served about the same 106 to 110 searches a second. Its speed follows CPU: at 100K, 2 GB has 4 CPUs to 1 GB's 2 and served twice as many searches.
| Size | 1M docs | p95 | 100K docs | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 512 MB | 400 | 59 ms | ||
| 1 GB | Not measured | 406 | 59 ms | |
| 2 GB | 106 | 151 ms | 798 | 16 ms |
| 4 GB | 110 | 146 ms | ||
| 8 GB | Not measured |
Elasticsearch
At 1M documents, going from 2 GB to 4 GB more than doubled Elasticsearch's searches a second and cut p95 from 68 to 27 ms. 8 GB gives the same speed as 4 GB: both have 6 CPUs, and both served about 270 searches a second. Pick 8 GB only if your index needs the memory. At 100K, the gain from 1 GB to 2 GB came with the extra CPUs.
| Size | 1M docs | p95 | 100K docs | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Not measured | 283 | 67 ms | |
| 2 GB | 122 | 68 ms | 782 | 9.3 ms |
| 4 GB | 273 | 27 ms | ||
| 8 GB | 268 | 27 ms |
Measured on always-on engines on our production hardware, through the public engine endpoint, with synthetic 1 KB product documents and 4 clients searching back to back. One run per size, on a server shared with customer engines, so treat the numbers as a guide: your data and queries will differ. How we measured.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Free moves to a paid plan through checkout. Between Starter, Pro and Scale you switch in Billing at any time, and the change takes effect at once. An upgrade charges the prorated difference straight away. A move to a lower paid plan credits the unused time on your next invoice. To go back to Free, cancel in the billing portal. The cancellation takes effect at the end of your billing period, and your account moves to Free then.
After a downgrade or a cancel, everything keeps running for 3 days. Then Headband parks the engines the new plan does not include and makes projects past its project limit read-only. Their data is kept, searches on read-only projects keep working, and an upgrade brings everything back. If a payment fails and is never recovered, the same happens 14 days after the plan ends.
On Free, a request over a limit gets a 429 with code usage_limit_exceeded. The search limit resets each month, stored data and projects free up when you delete some, and upgrading ends the search and storage caps and raises the project limit. Paid plans never stop searches or writes for usage: usage above what the plan includes is billed at the plan's rates. Owners and admins get an email at 80% and at 100% of each included amount, and Billing shows the overage projected for the period. The rate limit on each plan's card covers search, multi-search and document writes. A burst over it gets a 429 with code rate_limited and a Retry-After header. Other limits are fixed per key, the same on every plan. Writes share 100 requests a minute per key: bulk imports, document writes, creating and deleting indexes, and settings changes. Hybrid search gets 300 a minute. AI search gets 1,000 a minute, shared with search and multi-search.
The size of your documents as JSON, averaged over the month. The same data costs the same on every engine we host. Indexes on your own engine are not billed for stored data, and always-warm engines are billed by RAM only.
We are still learning what search costs to run. Prices may change, always with 30 days' notice by email.
Today you can Bring Your Own Engine: point indexes at your own Meilisearch, Typesense, or Elasticsearch cluster so the search index lives in your infrastructure. Headband still stores control-plane metadata, encrypted engine configs, hashed keys, usage, and analytics. Self-hosting the Headband platform itself is not offered today, and the platform's license is not final. The client packages (@headband/react, @headband/cli, @headband/sync and @headband/drizzle) are MIT licensed.
Community support (Free): no stated response time. Email support (Starter and Pro): first response within 1 business day. Priority support (Scale): first response within 4 business hours. What counts as a business day.
We accept all major credit cards, through Stripe. Paid plans bill monthly.
We offer discounts for startups, open-source projects, and educational institutions. Email sales@headband.dev to discuss.