In the early days, people would set up their own Elastic Search clusters and have troubles maintaining it, keeping it secure, also this required a lot of manual work to get the data in, keep it current, query it... etc. A couple of years ago AWS came up with AWS Elastic Search Service, which reduced some of this overhead. My previous teams and I went through all of these different stages, and ultimately, discovering Algolia a couple of years ago, solved so many of our issues, kept the cost low, reduced dramatically Implementation therefore GTM timelines, and freed up so much of our engineering bandwidth. They have SDKs for most common languages and platforms, and you can achieve a complete solution in just a matter of hours if not minute. Value your own/your team's engineering time. Factor that in when comparing costs. There should also be entry-level tiers you can get a proof of concept rolled out with.