When my two co-founders and I finally took the plunge, quit our day jobs, and started Meilisearch, we immediately decided to open source the code of our search engine.

We did it because it felt natural: we were accustomed to using and contributing to open source projects, and had started working on Meilisearch with the hope that it could be useful to other developers. We didn't expect that working in open source would quickly become a monumental force that now drives the company's strategy and our entire way of working.

We went from nothing to a community of almost 30k developers—with over 90k unique users every month—in less than two years.

In this article, I'll explain our vision for improving the user-facing search experience and why it can only be accomplished through open source.

**Why did we create Meilisearch?**
----------------------------------

Before creating Meilisearch, my co-founders and I worked in an innovation team at a big-name French e-commerce company. Our last mission there was to reinvent their site navigation through search.

> We were fed up with seeing second-rate search bars on the sites and products we loved.

We quickly understood the high cost and complexity of configuring and maintaining existing search solutions, all for less-than-great results. Even the most successful solution on the market, Algolia, was positioned mainly for large e-commerce accounts where a good search experience could translate directly to increased revenue. We were fed up with seeing second-rate search bars on the sites and products we loved.

That's why we decided to create a search engine that could suit all types of products and companies to end the mediocre search crisis. Search, welcome to the 21st century!

**Why our vision can't happen without open source**
---------------------------------------------------

### Open source attracts developers

It’s well known that search experiences on the web are often dissatisfactory. But what is a search engine in the first place?

I would argue that a search engine is, above all, a tool for developers—much like a database. And if we look at the history of databases, open-source options are among the most popular. Access to the code, ease of deployment and modification, being part of a community—these are just some of the points that attract developers to open source tools.

Thanks to our decision to go open source, developers can try out Meilisearch as a side project, as part of their education, or—if they are lucky—during their work. Moreover, if they need help, they know that thousands of other developers like them are ready to answer their questions. If they have a problem, they can easily report it and even help fix it.

### Open source generates feedback

Developers can have a **direct impact** on the direction of an open-source project by giving feedback and creating issues on GitHub.

> We don't need to go looking for feedback anymore; it comes naturally to us.

Whether coming from our many [GitHub repositories](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch), our [Slack community](https://slack.meilisearch.com), or our [public roadmap](https://roadmap.meilisearch.com), we get hundreds of bits of feedback every week—not to mention some great conversations with developers. We don't need to go looking for feedback anymore; it comes naturally to us.

This co-design process is vital to all of our product development, and it doesn’t stop with feedback: we also receive a lot of direct code contributions, helping us to improve and maintain our search engine, SDKs, and dev tools.

### Open source helps us build quickly

Using search to improve user experiences on the web is not an easy task. It is impossible for a company of our size to tackle the problem from all sides at once. On our own, we have to take the problems one by one.

However, we are not on our own. In addition to helping us prioritize our roadmap, our community also helps us tackle more problems at once—including many that are not our priority.

For example, if tomorrow several community members need an integration with Shopify, we can help them develop it and then share it with the rest of the community. Our product is able to grow gradually, procedurally, according to our user’s needs.

If today we have [20 libraries](https://github.com/meilisearch/awesome-meilisearch#integrations) updated every month, it's thanks to our community!

### Open source influences our design

Improving the search experience for all is not only about distributing a good search engine; it is also and above all about designing a good search engine. And once again, open source brings its own set of advantages. Public development naturally pushes us towards the most straightforward, intuitive solution possible so that developers can use and test it quickly.

> Today, we can confidently say that we have the most convenient search engine on the market.

Since day one, simplicity of use has been at the heart of the Meilisearch project. Step one was a massive investment in the project [documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com). Then, thanks to the community and our completely public product management, we made sure that each new feature was understandable by everyone and very easy to access. Today, we can confidently say that we have the most convenient search engine on the market.

Conclusion
----------

You will have understood by now: open source is part of our DNA. Thanks to it and with it, we intend to grow our solution and change the world of search. That's why we will continue to work hand in hand with our community and together improve the search experience for internet users across the globe.

If you also feel concerned about the state of search, please help us in our fight by [joining the community](https://slack.meilisearch.com). If you want to show your support, you can star or “watch” our [GitHub repository](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch) to receive updates.

Glad to have you with us on this journey,

Quentin de Quelen

PS: If you are already using Meilisearch and are looking for a hosted version, check out our new [Cloud offering](https://www.meilisearch.com/pricing). Don't have time for the waiting list? Reach out on our [community Slack](https://slack.meilisearch.com) and tell us about your situation so we can give you access as soon as possible.

How open source drives our strategy

We founded Meilisearch with a simple idea: what if we could take the top-of-the-line instant search experience found only in the most expensive websites and apps, make it affordable and accessible, and bring it to the rest of the internet?

Over time, this dream transformed into a mission and then into reality. We hired developers, partnered with investors, and, before we knew it, we had an effective, flexible, and—most importantly—_convenient_ search solution.

Our code was open-source from the beginning—this was an obvious decision since we were already open-source contributors. What was less obvious then was that open-source would become one of our greatest strengths as a software company and significantly accelerate Meilisearch's adoption. However, to become a truly accessible and widespread project capable of reshaping the world of search, Meilisearch needed high-quality SDK wrappers, libraries, tools, documentation, and support—all of which came with a price tag. It was clear that we needed to come up with a monetization solution, one that wouldn’t compromise the trust we’ve built with our open-source community.

There are many ways to monetize around open source software development, but one immediately stood out: **a cloud offering**. It appealed to us not just because some Meilisearch users were already asking for it, but because it would enable us to keep improving our open-source search engine. Unlike some options that provide a parallel paid product with access to exclusive features, this approach allows us to build a product _on top_ of the open-source project.

For businesses and individuals that want to quickly create a best-in-class search experience, we can offer the convenience of Meilisearch Cloud; for everyone else, we can offer our fully open-source search engine with all the features funded by our paid clients. This follows our bottom-up approach and helps us make sure we are constantly catering to a larger audience.

This is what we’ve been hard at work on over the past few months: **[Meilisearch Cloud](https://cloud.meilisearch.com/)**, our Software-as-a-Service offering.

The development of Meilisearch Cloud  

---------------------------------------

The road to Meilisearch Cloud started eight months ago when we gave [Samuel—whom you might have seen on GitHub](https://github.com/eskombro) or Slack— [Léna](https://github.com/lpinot) and [Nico](https://github.com/nicolasvienot) a mission to make a proof-of-concept application pushing the limits of what we could technically build. They created a [sandbox](https://sandbox.meilisearch.com/) that allows anyone to try Meilisearch for free for 48 hours.

Using this first experience, we began working on our cloud offering. Along the way, we onboarded a few users, did some UX testing, improved the UI, and added features to make it easy to update and manage Meilisearch instances.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Capture_d_e_cran_2022_04_06_a_10_39_12_458b9f351e.png)

Managing your Meilisearch instances from your browser

We designed [our pricing](https://www.meilisearch.com/pricing) for simplicity and based costs on the amount of resources allocated to the Meilisearch instance. We quickly understood that this model wouldn’t fit everyone’s needs, so one of our next steps will be to develop a “serverless” offering with pricing based on API consumption.

The private launch  

---------------------

Throughout February and March we have been quietly onboarding people and taking them off the waiting list.  Today, some companies are already running Meilisearch Cloud in production, and we are now onboarding all the remaining companies registered on the waiting list.

If you are one of them, we ask for just a bit more patience. We have more than a thousand applications to get through, and we want to make sure we maintain the same great experience you already have with Meilisearch. We’ll try to onboard everyone in the next four weeks.

Open-source vs. Cloud  

------------------------

We could not be more excited to announce Meilisearch Cloud and bring our search engine to a whole new group of users. Still, this process hasn’t been without its challenges.

We care deeply about accessibility, transparency, collaboration, and learning. Open source values have become a part of our company and the way we work in a way we never imagined. At the same time, something that’s not often talked about is that open-source development is not free:  the labor of developers, technical writers, support engineers, and myriad other contributors must be fairly compensated so these people can continue maintaining and improving a project.

By creating Meilisearch Cloud, we have chosen to position ourselves in the middle of the open-source and corporate worlds. We want the best of both: the impact and growth rate allowed by a paid product, with the transparency, accessibility, and strong ethical core provided by open source.

Conclusion  

-------------

This is a big step for Meilisearch as this will be our first paid offering. If you would like to try it, you can [still register on the waiting list](https://meilisearch.typeform.com/to/FtnzvZfh?typeform-source=www.meilisearch.com) or wait for the public release planned a few weeks from now.

You can always star our repositories or share our work if you want to support us. See you on [Slack](https://slack.meilisearch.com) or [GitHub](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch); always happy to answer your questions regarding what we are building :)

  
PS: [We are recruiting a full stack software engineer](https://jobs.lever.co/meili/) to help us with our cloud offering!

Our first SaaS product: the history behind Meilisearch Cloud

Today I'm proud to announce that Meilisearch has closed a $5M USD Seed funding round led by [CRV](https://www.crv.com/) with the participation of Robin Vasan ([Mango Capital](http://www.mangocap.com/)), Guillermo Rauch (CEO of [Vercel](https://vercel.com/meili)), and returning investors [LocalGlobe](https://localglobe.vc/) and [Seedcamp](https://seedcamp.com/).

What is Meilisearch?
====================

For more than two years now, we have been working to redefine the world of user-facing search.

We chose to tackle this challenge for a few reasons. From a user perspective, we were tired of seeing great products with terrible search bars. As developers, we also knew how difficult it is to set up a good search experience: there are few tools available, and of those, most are either too complicated, too expensive, or not powerful enough.

From the start, we made several bold choices that empowered us to create Meilisearch as it is today.

First, we chose to make our project open source. We did this primarily because it was our reflex as developers, but also because it was the best way to reach the maximum number of users. From the beginning our goal was to provide a good search engine for developers; why wait until we deemed the product complete to put it in their hands? Instead of building something for our users, we chose to build alongside them.

Secondly, we picked Rust as the main programming language for our engine. This was a difficult choice in 2019, because although it was elected the language of the year, few companies had invested in this technology and the number of dedicated Rust developers was still small. We forged ahead because we believed that its superior performance would more than make up for any potential downsides.

These choices, while counterintuitive at the time, have become our greatest strengths. Starting from our very first public communication, there was an overwhelming response from developers. For several months in a row, we were one of the fastest-growing open-source projects on GitHub. That's when we decided to raise our first round of funding from European investors to double down on our product and growth.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Screenshot_2022_01_18_at_15_01_22_482f82eba5.jpg)

In less than two years the project has grown enormously: today we have more than 20k stars on GitHub, almost 100k developers using our engine every month, and thousands of servers in production. Our product managed to strike a chord in the heart of developers who were tired of inadequate search. In doing so, we fulfilled the mission we set ourselves at the beginning.

What's next?
============

Our latest round of funding allows us to invest more heavily in our community. We’ve already created a product that sparks developers’ imaginations; now our mission is to give them the tools and support they need to build amazing sites and apps with Meilisearch. We will do this by building a team whose sole purpose will be managing, feeding, and growing an inclusive community.

Of course, we will also continue to work on our product. We have many new features coming that have been massively requested by users.

In addition, now that we have so many users on our open source project, we are getting more and more requests from companies that would like to use a version of Meilisearch managed by us instead of having to manage the service themselves. That's why we started to develop [Meilisearch Cloud](https://meilisearch.typeform.com/to/FtnzvZfh?typeform-source=admin.typeform.com) a few months ago. With Meilisearch Cloud, we are taking the power and simplicity of our engine, optimizing for it, and managing it for our users. In just a few weeks of beta, we have already received hundreds of requests for access.

If you’ve supported, used, or contributed to Meilisearch in the past: thank you! We are planning to grow the team and will be recruiting all kinds of roles in the coming months. If you want to help us shape the future of website and app search, we're [looking for more talent](https://www.welcometothejungle.com/companies/meilisearch) to help us sustain our vision.

  
Quentin de Quelen - CEO of Meilisearch

Meilisearch raises a $5M Seed to change the world of user-facing search

**tl;dr:** We recently raised 1,5M euros from LocalGlobe, Seedcamp, Kima & Tiny.vc. This funding will allow us to focus on building a community of early adopters & contributors around our open search engine [Meilisearch](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch).

We are still at the very beginning of our open source adventure and we are thrilled to see that more and more people believe in this project. This is our first fundraise and it means the world for the Meili team 🎉

### Meili got funded!

Meili SAS (the company) was created in November of 2018 with the idea of building an alternative to existing search engine APIs like Algolia. After some successes and failures as a team and company, we decided to raise some money to keep focus on building Meilisearch and its ecosystem.

We believe that an exceptionalsearch experience on websites and applications should be the norm, not an exclusive feature. Thus we are building the most straightforward technology for developers to offer state-of-the-art search to their users, scaling from the tiniest of operations all the way up to enterprise.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/david_armstrong_srp_E_a5_W418_unsplash_beb73be50e.jpg)

How we got there
----------------

Meilisearch has been open source since the [earliest days](/blog/open-source-or-not/)f its development. As developers, we made our project accessible on GitHub from day one but without the idea of being an "open source company". First and foremost we set out to make a simpler alternative to Algolia for smaller businesses who needed something more developer-friendly and affordable.

After describing our project to many developers, we quickly realize that one of the main differences from Algolia was that Meilisearch is open source. Still we weren't using open source as a force.

In late 2019, after some substantial discussion within the team, we decided to [fully commit to orienting the business around open source](/blog/to-open-source-and-beyond/)e could not quietly bootstrap anymore since we decided to build a community around our project to get feedback and contributions from external developers.

We wrote our [Beta release blog post](/blog/meilisearch-beta-release/)or Meilisearch in November of 2019. Since then we have been working hard at making Meilisearch the new obvious choice for developers when it comes to building a search box.

Charlotte, who joined us in August of 2019, did an incredible job of directing the writing and making of our [documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com/) while Clémentine, who joined us one month later, took charge of developing the [SDKs and integrations](https://github.com/meilisearch/integration-guides) to ease the use of Meilisearch.

Fundraise
---------

In late 2019 we began to meet with investors because we knew we wouldn't be able to develop the business without help from industry veterans.

The first key meeting that we had was with [Alexis from Kima](https://twitter.com/ale6_) who helped us make our pitch understandable to VCs. Alexis was presented to us as `THE investor who understand tech` in Paris. Not only did he understood what we wanted to build, he also did an amazing job at introing us to relevant funds regarding our stage & business 😁  
  
Then from meeting to meeting we met the different persons we are now working with: [Mish](https://twitter.com/mishmashkautsan?lang=en) & [Louis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/knightwebb/?originalSubdomain=uk) from [LocalGlobe](https://localglobe.vc/) as lead investor, [Sia](https://twitter.com/siahouchangnia?lang=en) from [SeedCamp](https://seedcamp.com/), [Alexis](https://twitter.com/ale6_) from [Kima](https://www.kimaventures.com/) & [Philipp](https://twitter.com/pmoe?lang=en) from [Tiny.vc](https://www.tiny.vc/).

The deal we made with the VCs is that we develop the community and the usage around Meilisearch while we better understand the use-cases of our search engine. From there we will be able to generate revenue. [Our business plan is publicly available](/blog/meilisearch-open-business-plan-v0-1/)s a iteratively developed document.

What's next?
------------

### Core features

We made an [open roadmap](http://roadmap.meilisearch.com/) and we will publish more roadmap communications in the coming weeks to get better feedback on what developers need in a search engine API.

There are some features that we know we need to build in order to be competitive as a search engine backend (basic analytics and authorization system 🚧) that are already planned. We are also discussing with developers & companies to gain more insight on features that should be game-changers in the enterprise search industry!

### Integrations & Documentation

All of this work around Meilisearch would not make any sense if Meilisearch is not used. To ease the integration of Meilisearch we are building different [SDKs](https://github.com/meilisearch/integration-guides) in different languages and improving our [documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com/) every week.

We want anyone to be able to integrate Meilisearch in any common programming environment in less than 5 minutes. Today, with our most mature front- and back-end libraries you should be able to setup a proof-of-concept in less than an hour. We are hard at work shaving off those remaining 55 minutes to get where we want to be.

### Open source & values

As we learn to build a commercial open source software company, we are thriving for transparency on everything we do. To raise awareness around open source sustainability, Erlend is publishing a podcast called [Value in Open](/blog/value-in-open-1-posthog/)e already have our first episode released, and the second one should follow shortly 😁

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/kelly_sikkema_XX_2_W_Tb_Lr3r8_unsplash_1_877c2e9d79.jpg)

  
We are delighted and excited about the future of Meilisearch 😁 if you want to reach us for anything, [please feel free to do so](https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/contact.html)!

Meili raises 1.5M€ for open source search in Rust

Value in Open #1 - PostHog

> This is the spiritual sequel to our [Open Business Plan](/blog/meilisearch-open-business-plan-v0-1/)hese open documents are continuously iterated on in our publicly available [Project Handbook](https://www.notion.so/meilisearch/Project-Handbook-e818a836dd3f4df1bde7c3989c9a0ae4).

Being a young project, our values are not yet fully formed. As such, we take our value cues from established organizations that we are closely aligned with. To date, these are: Mozilla, World Wide Web Foundation, Open Organization (Red Hat) and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

With the decades of experience and thinking that has gone into the principles we've adopted from the giants, we found it difficult to add anything original or especially representative of Meilisearch as a company. But in the past week, a recurring theme in tech and open source circles resurfaced once more on the Rust Users forum: [Can technology be apolitical?](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-says-tech-will-always-be-political/43627)

The Meilisearch team unanimously agrees that the answer to this question is a resounding **'no'**. For some apt argumentation in favor of this conclusion, see the posts of [XAMPPRocky](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-says-tech-will-always-be-political/43627/15?u=erlend_sh), [kornel](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-says-tech-will-always-be-political/43627/17?u=erlend_sh) and [IsaacWoods](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-says-tech-will-always-be-political/43627/27?u=erlend_sh).

> _XAMPPRocky said:_  
>   
> The Rust project is a real world community and organisation of people that works on building new versions and provides support. Which is done mostly by volunteers and a lot of whom are people who are underrepresented in tech. This organisation of volunteers has the agency to try to build the type of community it wants to be a part of and participate in. Since the very start the Rust project has had a [Code Of Conduct](https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct) which states the following in the very first line.  
>   
> "We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all"  
>   
> This is an inherently political statement when we live in a world where there has been significant systemic injustice against people of colour and queer folk, both in tech and in the world at large. Working towards providing a welcoming environment for all requires an active voice to push back.

See also the [introductory text](https://firstdonoharm.dev/) of the Hippocratic License:

> Politics and software are so tangled that they cannot be reasonably separated. Consider the GPS software that tells you how to get to a restaurant; it’s also used to direct military drones to their targets. The facial recognition software  that unlocks your phone? It’s being  used to record, track, and target the activities of political  dissenters.

The goal of this declaration is to clearly state our strongly held principles, and the way we want to contribute to our environment. Thinking of technology as inherently apolitical is incompatible with our values as a company, and  we will focus our efforts on interacting and collaborating with those who share this principle with us.

* * *

Our Core Values (v0.1)
======================

Homegrown Principles
--------------------

As we mature as a project, our ideological identity will become more defined. We are starting with a single principle of our own making:

### Technology is political

Every new creation (for work, art, pleasure...) is necessarily based in previous knowledge, paradigms and tools that aren't anything but the  result of political and social constructions and history. The scope of  "what is possible" is necessarily defined by how our field has evolved  in a determined economic and political context, and any intention to transform it is necessarily political.

By acknowledging this, we recognize that neutrality is not an option for us as a values-driven company and participant in the open source movement.

Mozilla Manifesto
-----------------

We are committed to an internet that catalyzes collaboration among diverse communities working together for the common good.

We are inextricably linked to the Mozilla Foundation through our deep involvement with Rust. We greatly admire the Mozilla foundation’s work and we commit ourselves to upholding the 10 principles set forth in their [Manifesto](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/). Especially relevant to us are principles 5-9:

> **Principle 5**  
> Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.

> **Principle 6**  
> The effectiveness of the internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.

> **Principle 7**  
> Free and open source software promotes the development of the internet as a public resource.

> **Principle 8**  
> Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.

> **Principle 9**  
> Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.

Contract for The Web
--------------------

We endorse the [Contract for The Web](https://contractfortheweb.org/). Most relevant to us are its Company Principles (addendum in \[brackets\]):

> **Principle 4**  
> Make \[essential technology on\] the internet affordable and accessible to everyone

> **Principle 5**  
> Respect and protect people’s privacy and personal data to build online trust

> **Principle 6**  
> Develop technologies that support the best in humanity and challenge the worst

Open Organization
-----------------

We adopt the [Open Organization Definition](https://opensource.com/open-organization/resources/open-org-definition) by Red Hat in its entirety:

*   Transparency ([Project Handbook](https://www.notion.so/meilisearch/Project-Handbook-e818a836dd3f4df1bde7c3989c9a0ae4) and [Open Business Plan](/blog/meilisearch-open-business-plan-v0-1/)   Inclusivity ([Contact us - Communication conventions](https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/contact.html))
*   Adaptability
*   Collaboration (Contribution Guidelines coming soon)
*   Community ([To open source, and beyond!](/blog/to-open-source-and-beyond/)N Sustainable Development Goals
--------------------------------

As a distributed, internet-based project, it can feel like we are one step removed from the “real world” and our impact on it. But as technology becomes ever more pervasive in our economy, infrastructure and communities, our actions have very real and immediate consequences.

We acknowledge our place in the interconnected world, and in our own small way we are committed to its betterment. None of our activities should have adverse effects on the [UN Sustainable Development Goals](https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/), and we'll do what we can to advance Goals 8, 9 and 10 (addendum in \[brackets\]):

> **Goal 8**  
> Decent Work and Economic Growth; Sustainable economic growth will require societies to create the conditions that allow people to have quality jobs.

> **Goal 9**  
> Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure; Investments in \[technological, open source\] infrastructure are crucial to achieving sustainable development

> **Goal 10**  
> Reduced Inequalities; To reduce inequalities, policies should be universal in principle, paying attention to the needs of disadvantaged and marginalized populations.

Meilisearch Values v0.1: Tech is political

> This is the first of a series of posts that will present our publicly developed [Project Handbook](https://www.notion.so/meilisearch/Project-Handbook-e818a836dd3f4df1bde7c3989c9a0ae4).

Any open source project with the intention to commercialize its value creation should be able to answer this question: **How will you make money?**

Seth Godin's "[The Modern Business Plan](https://seths./blog/2010/05/the-modern-business-plan/)" provides a very useful, prose-focused template that lends itself well to consumption by the general public. This is the v0.1 release of our _Open Business Plan_.

> It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but  they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore and show an ability to comply with expectations. If I want the real truth about a business and where  it’s going, I’d rather see something else. I’d divide the modern  business plan into five sections:  
>   
> **1\. Truth**  
> **2\. Assertions**  
> **3\. Alternatives**  
> **4\. People**  
> **5\. Money**

Truth
-----

> The truth section describes the world as it is.  Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, the way others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific the better. The more ground knowledge the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The point of this section is to be sure that you’re clear about the way you see the world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn’t partisan, it takes no positions, it just states how things are. Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include spreadsheets, market share analysis and anything I need to know about how the world works.

If you want to set up an advanced content search for your website or app _today_, the leading options are [Algolia](https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/comparison_to_alternatives.html#meilisearch-vs-algolia) and [Elastic](/blog/why-should-you-use-meilisearch-over-elasticsearch/) both great products, but neither can service a large segment of small to medium-sized businesses that are operating on a tight budget and/or need an easily maintainable setup for on-premises management.

We are not setting out to _kill_, _crush_ or _destroy_ our competitors. We are here to _question_, _challenge_, and _elevate_ the status quo.

Meili SAS is in large part modeling itself after Algolia and Elastic. We also take loads of inspiration from the business strategies of WordPress, Discourse, Sentry, CockroachDB and TimescaleDB. Like them, we are building a [Commercial Open Source Company](https://coss.media/coss-company-value-creation-capture-fundamentals/).

One of our most important competitive advantages is [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/). It enables us to confidently engineer the highly complex machinery of a search engine without crippling risk of technical debt or dead-ends. With Rust we can fearlessly explore the next frontier of search, safe in the knowledge that our code can always be refactored without bringing the whole foundation down.

Assertion
---------

> The assertions section is your chance to describe how you’re going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action. This is the heart of the modern business plan. The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you’re going to do and what impact it’s going to have.

We are going to spend the next year building _trust_, starting with an extensive **developer community**. We intend to rally this community around our out-in-the-open construction of Meilisearch as the easiest search engine of its kind to set up and modify to your application's needs.

Eventually, customers will get to choose between the instant value of SaaS, or the full control of self-hosted.

SaaS will be our initial focus as a company. It's the more proven model available to us. But we won't build any exclusives into our offering; any search feature we build for our SaaS offering will either be open source or source-available (i.e. freely available for non-commercial use; purchasable license for commercial use).

### Incentives for self-hosting

We intend to structure our business in a way that incentivizes a continued investment in the self-hosting capabilities of Meilisearch. Many open source companies with a SaaS offering end up with inverse incentives to continue improving their user-facing installation story because it competes with their SaaS business. By exploring fair ways to monetize our on-premises offering in commercial contexts we will ensure an ongoing equilibrium in our incentives.

### Self-hosting as a self-negotiator on pricing

A SaaS product that can be alternatively self-hosted with ease is inherently pricing-transparent. When discerning customers can effortlessly compare the experience of our managed SaaS versus our on-premises package, it keeps our pricing honest.

Alternatives
------------

> Of course, this \[assertion\] section will be incorrect. You will make  assertions that won’t pan out. You’ll miss budgets and deadlines and  sales. So the alternatives section tells me what you’ll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don’t pan out, is it over?

The likes of Elastic, CockroachDB and GitLab have proven that there is not a singular best option for product delivery. Many customers just want the simplicity of SaaS, but many others **must** have on-premise services. We do not yet know which there will be more appetite for when it comes to Meilisearch, but we are prepared to follow the path of least resistance.

People
------

> The people section rightly highlights the key element… who is on your team, who is going to join your team. ‘Who’ doesn’t mean their resume, who means their attitudes and abilities and track record in shipping.

[Meet the team](https://meilisearch.notion.site/MeiliSearch-Team-b7f24733f4944fa9b09fd518d6fc3eff) (WIP)

Money
-----

> And the last section is all about money. How much do you need, how will you spend it, what does cash flow look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins and exit strategies.

We raised a pre-seed round in may, and are backed by LocalGlobe, Seedcamp and Kima. We have already partnered with industry heavyweights like Louis Vuitton and [Platform.sh](http://platform.sh/).

Next step is to create pages similar to these:

*   [https://docs.opencollective.com/help/about/investors](https://docs.opencollective.com/help/about/investors)
*   [https://docs.opencollective.com/help/about/the-open-collective-way/core-contributors-compensation](https://docs.opencollective.com/help/about/the-open-collective-way/core-contributors-compensation)

* * *

We hope you enjoyed this _[very early](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often)_ v0.1.0 release of our Open Business Plan. You'll notice that Seth's article asks for several items of information that we have not yet addressed here. We hope to share more over time, but this requires more dialogue with our investors and other stakeholders.

Please let us know what information you'd most like us to share, and we will prioritize it. Come talk to us in the comments on [/r/opensource](https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/gv7kht/meilisearch_open_business_plan_v01/), [/r/rust](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gv7ugp/meilisearch_open_business_plan_v01/), or find us on our [default community channels](https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/contact.html).

> Interested in what Meilisearch could do for your business? If you [answer this survey](https://meilisearch.typeform.com/to/tsTOTw) you will be the first to know when our initial service offering is operational.

Meilisearch - Open business plan v0.1

Today, we are proud to share our long-term vision and the strategic priorities to be pursued in the year ahead.

But, as a first step, let me give you an overview of what we have achieved in 2019. Year One was an absolutely exciting and crazy time for us; we have been keeping busy with determining our market position. Should we limit ourselves only to large accounts, e-commerce, SaaS for start-ups and SMBs? How do we position ourselves in relation to Elasticsearch and Algolia?

In 2019 we created from scratch an **instant, relevant, and typo-tolerant search engine in Rust**, which [source code is open source](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch).

We've been fortunate to work with Louis Vuitton, for whom [we integrated our engine into one of its iOS application](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6516669414975291392/). We're not shy to say this application is now in production for several months and is used daily by more than 4,000 employees.

Our team also got bigger at the end of the year! [Clementine](https://github.com/curquiza) and [Charlotte](https://twitter.com/cvermandbe/) joined us as developers and took care of the documentation and SDK parts. Finally, we decided in December 2019 to get more involved in the open source community.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/shallow_focus_photo_of_green_potted_plant_822474_b753048259.jpg)

The open source way of life
---------------------------

We have spent a year getting to know the Search Engine Market better and identifying potential opportunities. We analyzed the companies making up the market we were targeting. What were their needs? What were our competitor's strengths and weaknesses?

To our surprise, 90% of mobile applications today have a completely inefficient search bar. And this is also true for apps from giants like Apple. Then, you may ask yourself why don't those apps use powerful search engines? Well, it is simply because of a lack of both powerful and affordable solutions. Algolia does indeed exist, but it is proprietary and requires a significant investment of money.

Many companies in the world [use technologies such as SQL databases](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking), most of the time, either MySQL or PostgreSQL, which are two of the most commonly used RDBMS. Backend developers are very familiar with them. What makes them so popular? They are both free and open source softwares, meaning that any developer can install and use them for free. And it changes everything.

Our main focus is to go open source. We want to become the reference solution in the end-user search domain. Choosing us to improve the search experience within any application or website should be the most obvious choice for developers.

Open source is not a new business concept. In the past few years, [existing companies](https://www.datamation.com/open-source/35-top-open-source-companies-1.html) proved that the open source business model can be a profitable one. There are many successful models to consider including Elasticsearch, but also MongoDB, Redis, and Sentry. Open source does not equate to making no profit and does not prevent you from having paying customers.

> Sentry has more paid customers than any other application monitoring service in the entire industry. Kind of mind blowing.
> 
> — David Cramer (@zeeg) [January 15, 2020](https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/1217546442706833413?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/two_brown_trees_1632790_c294309e8c.jpg)

Companies need hosted solutions
-------------------------------

The biggest concern with open source alternatives is that whereas they are easy to install and maintain, they are much harder to scale. You may potentially need to change servers, increase CPU, RAM, or add new machines to the cluster. It imposes too many constraints. That's why so many companies prefer using SaaS solutions that will carry out all these complex requirements for them. What is important is to keep in mind that the people responsible for the management of servers are scarce resources.

We, therefore, plan to release a cloud version of our search engine by the end of 2020 and ensure a simple transition from our current self-hosted version to a cloud version. We want the transition to be as smooth as possible. Imagine a "Migrate to Cloud" button that would make your application available all over the world with no latency.

Besides, our cloud solution aims to be much more complete. We are not just talking about automated server management, scalability, snapshotting, or geo-replication. We'll also offer search analytics, more comprehensive dashboards and recommendation systems. The next release will already introduce more tools and enhance the search relevancy.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/adventure_atmosphere_conifer_conifers_418831_8c002c9993.jpg)

Big business needs are specific
-------------------------------

Keeping data secure is a prevalent issue for large businesses in today's market. For reasons of confidentiality, such organizations can't afford to let SaaS services handle their data, or store it on servers overseas. The same goes for public and government services. Our solution is infrastructure agnostic; therefore, it can be easily installed in private cloud.

An "enterprise" plan also has to provide the basic functionalities required by large companies:

*   99.99 SLA
*   SSO
*   Single-tenant options
*   Support

All those features will be included soon enough.

The roadmap overview
--------------------

This year we'll be focusing on community and accessibility.

*   SDKs in all language ([JS](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-js), [Go](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-go), [Python](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-python), [Ruby](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-ruby), [PHP](https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch-php), etc.)
*   Database collectors (SQL, Mongo, Firebase)
*   Widgets for web and mobile. (VueJS, React, Android, iOS)
*   Available in popular marketplaces (Wordpress, Gatsby, Magento, Prestashop, etc.)

Documentation and telling examples will be part of all these integrations and SDKs. Demonstration videos will give you an insight on how to use our search engine in different use cases.

The next features you should expect to see in 2020:

*   [High availability](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/issues/410)
*   [Schemaless](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch/issues/422)
*   Facetting, categories
*   A dashboard
*   Search by geolocation
*   Search by date proximity
*   A GRPC interface

Last but not least, we are thrilled to announce you that a brand new website will also be launched at the beginning of the year.  
Do not hesitate to leave us a message and give us your impressions. Let's have a chat, or let's meet! If you like what we do, feel free to share our project and star the [Meilisearch project repository](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch).

To open source, and beyond!

We are proud and thrilled to present our [open-source search engine](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch). After one year of hard work, we are finally able to make our first official beta release.

We want to contribute to the open-source community by offering an ultra-relevant & instant search engine to improve the search experience in every application.

Meilisearch is the **first open-source instant search engine**. Instant means that our search engine is so fast to answer that you have the search-as-you-type experience - results are appearing and reordering on each keystroke.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/crates_io_demo_907b54a599.gif)

Meilisearch finds crates on [crates.meilisearch.com](https://crates.meilisearch.com)

We differ from other open-source search engines in many ways.Compared to Elastic Search (and other Lucene-based engines), we specialize in end-user search, and Meilisearch works out-of-the-box to that end. Compared to your database search engine, we are more relevant and way faster. We have typo-tolerance, and it works ;)

Motivations
-----------

We built Meilisearch with the end-users in mind, to reduce the friction between the user and the machine when using your app, browsing your website.

> You should not be Amazon or Google to have a good search engine.

It seems unfair to us that today, only the biggest companies could afford the luxury of a decent search engine. From the biggest corporations to your Sunday side-project, you should have a go-to search engine that does not cost you an arm and a leg. You should not need the financial means of Google or Amazon to afford that.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/photo_1571924035778_d53e10ef9858_dc0da161e2.jpeg)

Team
----

At the start, we were three developers. And because a developer knows how to recognize another good developer, we hired two other developers. Today, we are a team of five working on the engine, SDK's, front-end libraries, [documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com/), articles, and social media.

How did we survive at 5 in Paris for one year, you may ask. Well! We participated in a Hackaton about search organized by Louis Vuitton. At that time, we were already working on our search engine, and it seemed to be a call of destiny. We finished first!

Our winning price was three Louis Vuitton bags 👜, and then, as a little bonus, we signed a contract with them to develop our product and run it in production on their servers.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/Hackaton_920e7ba818.jpeg)

What's coming next
------------------

We will continue to work on the search engine to make it faster and more relevant than ever and adding features such as geolocation or trendiness. We will work on different APIs wrapper and front-end libraries to make Meilisearch more and more accessible. In a few months, we may even offer our search engine as a service to free you from the hassle of maintaining your infrastructure.

If our story inspired you, please give a try to our search engine. You can follow the quick start and read more about how it works in the documentation. If you want to support us, you can star the project on Github.

![](https://unable-actionable-car.media.strapiapp.com/tenor_1_c11a2fa59b.gif)

Ressources
----------

*   [Documentation](https://docs.meilisearch.com)
*   [Github](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch)
*   [Twitter](https://twitter.com/meilisearch)

Meilisearch latest news and company updates