> 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: Beta release!

We want to share our thoughts about open source and how we should license our code. This is entirely new to us, and we are still figuring out the best solution and opportunities so if you have any reading recommendation do not hesitate to tell us.

As a quick reminder: at Meili, we are building [an instant search engine](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliDB), in Rust 🦀, and we want to open source it. We are still wondering about the right business plan for us, and we may write about it too but the subject of the day is license!

Why did we choose to go open source?
------------------------------------

We believe that every application deserves a decent search engine. That means that search engine technology should become a commodity. We found a sweet spot between Algolia which is very developer-friendly but proprietary and Elastic Search which is difficult to set up for an instant search.
  
We think that if you want to become the standard technology in your field, you should be open source, that way you get to build your features with the people who use it and you gain trust around your code. Also, because we are cool developers, we are using a lot of open source code, and we want to give back by contributing to open source and also sharing our projects.

What is open source?
--------------------

Open source is complicated, and if you ask two persons a definition of open source, you may realize that there are many definitions of open source. [Steve Klabnik wrote a very interesting blog post](https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source) about the culture war at the heart of open source in which we learned about open source history and why people are fighting over its definition.

In the beginning, there was the Free Software Foundation, which was created in 1985. The FSF was founded by Richard Stallman to support the GNU Project and the concept of Free Software: the idea that software should be free to use, free to copy it and free to redistribute it. However, the term Free is very restrictive. For the FSF, a Free Software must be under a copyleft license. Copyleft implies that all the work deriving from it must also be copyleft. We call this a “hereditary” or “contaminating” license, and we quickly understand that this kind of license could scare businesses.

Then there was the Open Source Initiative, a non-profit organization created in 1998. Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens wrote the Open Source Definition which frames less restrictive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSDs, etc.). These licenses all require to credit the author of the software you are using, but what you are building can have any other license. One of the goals of this Open Source Definition was to be more "business-friendly" because the term "Free" could scare companies, and by having a more friendly name and less restrictive licenses you can encourage companies to invest and participate in open source.

* * *

To illustrate the differences, we can take two OS based on Unix: On one side there is the Linux kernel which is licensed under the GPLv2 (copyleft), and this is why Linux-based Android is open source. On the other hand, there is Berkely Software Distribution (BSD) which is licensed under the BSD license, and its most famous fork are iOS and Mac OS which are proprietary and private.

These are today's definitions of open source, and the problems are:

*   Everyone does not agree on one definition because everyone has its ideology of open source
*   Everyone does not play by the same rules: while some companies are releasing their GPL's licensed projects on some obscure FTP, others are releasing their code publicly on GitHub without an OSI approved license. What is open source to you?

Open source nowadays
--------------------

As you may have read in the last months, some "open source" projects changed their license for the same reasons. We think that [MongoDB explains it very well](https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq#what-we-sell):

> This is a time of incredible opportunity for open source projects, with the potential to foster a new wave of great open source server-side software. The reality, however, is that once an open source project becomes interesting, it is too easy for large cloud vendors to capture all the value but contribute nothing back to the community.

And they are not the only project worrying about this situation.

Redis, for example, [is licensing some of its Redis Modules under its own license](https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-labs-modules-license-changes/), the Redis Source Available License. They were previously using the Commons Clause over an Apache license. The Commons Clause adds some restriction on commercial distribution over an already existing license like the Apache one. But [they changed it for confusion reason](https://www.zdnet.com/article/redis-labs-drops-commons-clause-for-a-new-license/); people were not sure whether it was open source or not.

[Confluent changed its license too](https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform), from Apache they choose to create the Confluent Community License because they were afraid of some big cloud companies too.

Open source and Meili
---------------------

The point is not about whether big companies should contribute more or differently to open source but that open source is evolving, and we need a new definition, a new term to gather around and know what we are talking about.

Maybe we need labels to define and frame the ideology we are supporting as a company? Perhaps we need a patent-style system which states that every code that you release as a company will be under the MIT License or any other license 3 years after you wrote it. This way you could monetize your code for a period while enabling public disclosure of your code?

At Meili, we do not have a clear vision on these issues yet, but we are thinking about it a lot. We want our code to be available to anyone, free to use it and modify it for your projects. If you're going to use it for some personal project, go for it, if you want to use it for your company you should too. We do not wish to any cloud provider to git clone our project and be a competitor on a SaaS offering. Because we believe that our project will thrive more if we can build a sustainable business on it.

Today [our code is still under the MIT license](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliDB/blob/master/LICENSE), but tomorrow we might change it for the Commons Clause or write our public license as MongoDB and Confluent did. No, it won't be open source as the OSI state it, but we believe that making a publicly available source code is still better than closed source, too bad there is not a clear term of it today.

Open source or not?

It is never easy to start a blog, we never know what to say on the first blog post 😱 so I will keep it simple here.

We are Meili, a team of three developers. In our previous job we worked on building a search engine aiming for the best end-user experience.

The most common alternatives were Algolia or ElasticSearch. Where the first one is only available as a service, you hand over your data and could be expensive. The second one is overkill for a simple end-user search,  complicated to setup and configure.

So here came our idea to develop [an open source alternative](https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliDB) to Algolia, easy to setup, lightweight and fast.

So...

...Welcome on our blog! 🎉

I expect we will use it as often as possible to talk about what we build, company news and various thoughts.

  
(I just hope I won't be the only reader of this blog 🤭)

Meilisearch 最新消息和公司動態

Meilisearch - 開放商業計畫 v0.1

開源，以及更遠大的目標！

Meilisearch：Beta 版發布！

是否開源？

開始我們的部落格