Sonic Has a Free Search Backend: The Lightweight Alternative to Elasticsearch That Uses 10MB of RAM

You need search in your app. Elasticsearch wants 2GB of RAM minimum. Your $5/mo VPS has 1GB total. You could use a managed service at $50/mo, or you could use Sonic — a search backend that runs in 10MB of RAM and indexes documents 10x faster than Elasticsearch. What Sonic Actually Does Sonic is a fast, lightweight, schema-less search backend written in Rust. It's not a full search engine like Elasticsearch — it's a search index that you pair with your existing database. You push text into Sonic, and it builds an optimized search index. When users search, Sonic returns matching document IDs in microseconds. You fetch the full documents from your database. This architecture is intentional: Sonic does one thing (search indexing) extremely well instead of trying to be a database, analytics engine, and search engine all at once. The result is a binary under 5MB that handles millions of documents. Sonic uses a custom channel protocol over TCP (not HTTP/REST), with client libraries available