Microsoft adds Basic tier to its Azure Search offering

Besides making money through ads with its public search engine, Bing, Microsoft also sells search capabilities – powered by Azure – as a service to web and mobile developers to build custom search experiences. If you’re one of those developers thinking about adding Azure Search to your apps, there is good news, as Microsoft has added a more economical choice to their offerings in the new Basic tier, reports eWeek.

The Basic plan sits in the middle of the two existing tiers, Free and Standard, offering scale advantage to the former and cost advantage to the latter. The Basic plan allows indexing of maximum 1 million documents, compare to 10,000 and 50MB for the Free Plan, and 180 million and 300GB and up for the Standard Plan. The Basic Plan goes for $75 per month and will be half-off during the preview period.

“Basic is great for cases where you need the production-class characteristics of Standard but have lower capacity requirements,”

-Liam Cavanagh, principle program manager, Microsoft Azure Search

Azure Search’s admirable performance is discussed by principal program manager Liam Cavanagh including indexing roughly 15,000 documents per minute, a million documents in about an hour, and five queries per second with approximately 200 milliseconds delay. The Basic tier will give customers with smaller demands the advanced capabilities of Azure Search missing in the Free plan, with less of a budget burden then previously. Microsoft’s other cloud search indexer for unstructured data, the in-beta Azure Blob Storage, was also mentioned.