Best offer on record: Self-hosted Meilisearch (open source, MIT). 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
Self-hosted Meilisearch (open source, MIT) high confidence
Meilisearch engine is open source under the MIT license; self-hosting is free with no usage limits (no caps on documents, indexes, or queries). You deploy it on your own infra; only your own hosting/compute cost applies. No credit card, no account, no region limit, no expiry. Verified on the official pricing page FAQ: 'Meilisearch is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting is free... with no usage limits.'
Eligibility
Anyone: students, startups, enterprises. No .edu email, no company age/funding cap, no credit card. No region restrictions.
How to claim
No claim needed: download the binary/Docker image or install via package managers from GitHub (meilisearch/meilisearch, MIT licensed) and run it on your own infrastructure. Free and permanent.
Expiry
None — perpetual under the MIT license.
Gotchas
MIT license is permissive (no copyleft obligations on your app). Hidden costs are yours: server hosting, storage/egress, and operational maintenance. No hosted free tier substitutes for it.
Meilisearch Cloud free trial (14 days, no credit card) high confidence
Meilisearch Cloud (hosted, from ~$20/month; examples on pricing page: 100K docs + 50K searches ≈ $30/mo, or XS instance ≈ $23/mo) offers a '14-day free trial, no credit card required' per the official pricing page. The trial page/signup (cloud.meilisearch.com/register) asks only for name, work email, password (or Google/GitHub OAuth) — no published fixed dollar credit; trial scope/terms are not itemized on public pages. No permanent free hosted tier exists — after 14 days you move to paid usage-based or resource-based billing.
Eligibility
Anyone who signs up; work email requested; no published region limit; no credit card required.
How to claim
Start from the pricing or Cloud page: 'Start free trial' CTA → register at cloud.meilisearch.com/register (email or Google/GitHub) → create an instance and use it for 14 days.
Expiry
Trial ends after 14 days, after which paid Cloud pricing applies (from $20/month).
Gotchas
Trial is a trial, not a free tier — nothing renews. No published dollar credit amount; billing after trial is usage- or resource-based, so costs depend on docs/searches. No documented post-trial data-retention terms on public pages. Free offer is for the hosted service only; self-hosting (finding 1) is the only unlimited free option.
Startup offer (informal, sales-led) medium confidence
Meilisearch's startup-facing page ('Startups' under Solutions) has no formal published program — no fixed discount percentage, no duration, no company-age/funding caps. It offers: (a) the free 14-day Cloud trial, (b) free self-hosting during build/test ('you can self-host the engine for free while you build and test'), and (c) sales-led engagement: 'We work with teams of all stages on custom pricing and volume discounts, regardless of company size or funding stage' (page FAQ).
Eligibility
Effectively open: page FAQ says custom pricing applies 'regardless of company size or funding stage', so no stated age or funding cap. No .edu requirement, no card requirement for the trial.
How to claim
No self-serve claim for the discount itself: use the 'Startups' page CTAs — 'Start free trial' (self-serve) or 'Get custom demo' / contact sales to negotiate a custom plan. Any discount is case-by-case and unpublished.
Expiry
No published expiry; trial portion expires in 14 days.
Gotchas
Do not assume a standard startup discount exists; it is a sales conversation, not a published program, so terms are opaque and not guaranteed. The only self-serve free element is the 14-day trial.
No student/education program found: no education license or .edu-based offer exists for Meilisearch; the only public 'free' tracks are self-hosting (MIT, permanent) and the 14-day Cloud trial. No 2025–2026 sunset of a specific free offer was verifiable today: the 2026 blog listing (page 1) shows no pricing-change or program-sunset announcements, but WebSearch was unavailable this session (shared session search budget exhausted), so 2025 changes could not be searched across the web — treat the absence of a formal startup/education program as verified via the official pages fetched today, not as a searched conclusion. Known-so-far claims checked: MIT self-hosted = unlimited/free (confirmed, high confidence); Meilisearch Cloud 14-day trial, no card, no permanent free hosted tier (confirmed on the official pricing page today, 2026-10-22). Sources: https://www.meilisearch.com/pricing, https://www.meilisearch.com/solutions/startup, https://www.meilisearch.com/cloud.