Dartfind is a catalog search engine you install on your own server and own outright. One payment covers the license — no per-query fees, no per-record tiers, no bill that grows with your traffic. It reads what customers actually type — typos, partial SKUs, glued words — the same way an instant-search box should.
Built for distributors, wholesalers and e-commerce with large catalogs — from 10,000 to 100 million records.
Per-query and per-record pricing means every traffic spike, every catalog expansion, every good month shows up on the invoice. Search costs scale with revenue instead of staying flat.
Algolia is SaaS-only: your product data, prices and stock levels leave your network to be indexed on their infrastructure. For some security policies and data-residency rules, that ends the conversation.
Stop paying, search stops working. After years of subscription fees you own nothing. Search is the only part of the stack most companies still rent — and the rent never ends.
| Dartfind | Algolia | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | One-time license, owned outright | Per query and per record, forever — grows with traffic |
| Hosting | Your server, on-premise or your cloud | Their cloud only |
| Data location | Never leaves your network, works offline | Indexed on Algolia infrastructure |
| Typo tolerance | Native — typos, partial SKUs, glued words, no rules | Good, within plan limits and configuration |
| Infrastructure | One ordinary x86 server | None of yours — and none of your control |
| Long-term cost | Fixed. Price never grows with catalog or traffic | Recurring, scales with usage |
A comparison table where one column wins every row is an ad. Three cases where we’d tell you to stay put:
If your catalog is large, your traffic is real, and the per-query invoice keeps climbing — that's the profile where a one-time license wins the math in the first year and everything after is savings.
A sync script feeds your catalog into the engine — from a database or a plain export — and keeps it updated on schedule. A query endpoint answers searches; your storefront calls it instead of Algolia. Works alongside Adobe Commerce, SAP Commerce, Oro, BigCommerce or fully custom builds, because it sits behind an API rather than inside the platform. For most stacks this is days of work — and the free pilot skips integration entirely.
Those are numbers from a live deployment: an auto-parts retailer runs Dartfind as its counter and catalog search, fed with broken part numbers every day. Full case on the main page.
Send a catalog export — real or fake. Two days later you have a working search box in your infrastructure, next to your current Algolia setup. Type your customers’ worst queries at both. Then decide.