Some quick context: we are a small bootstrapped team that's been working on Typesense since 2015. It started out as a nights-and-weekends project, out of personal frustration with ElasticSearch's complexity for doing seemingly simple things. So we set out (maybe naively at the time), to see what it would take to build our own search engine, just to scratch our intellectual curiosity. Over the years, we've realized that it takes a LOT of nuanced effort to build a search engine that works well out of the box.
Our goal with Typesense is to democratize search technology on two fronts:
1. Simplify and reduce the amount of developer effort it takes to build a good search experience that works well out of the box. To this end, we pore over API design to make it intuitive and set sane defaults for all parameters.
2. Make good instant-search technology accessible to individuals and teams of all sizes. To this end, we decided to open source our work and make it completely free to self-host. We also optimize for reducing the operational overhead it takes to deploy Typesense to production (eg: single binary with no runtime dependencies, one-step clustering, etc).
In 2020, I left my full-time job and my co-founder left his full-time job a month ago, and we're now both working full-time on Typesense.
Happy to answer any questions!