Manage resources

Scale your Meilisearch Cloud project’s CPU and RAM up or down from the project settings.

Resource management applies to resource-based projects only. Usage-based projects scale automatically and do not have a configurable resource tier. If you are on a usage-based plan and want more control over your infrastructure, you can migrate to a resource-based project at any time by creating a new resource-based project and re-indexing your data.

You can scale a project’s resources up at any time from the Meilisearch Cloud dashboard, which increases available CPU and RAM. Scaling down is not available from the dashboard: contact [e-mail] to reduce a project’s resource tier.

Resource tiers

Each tier defines the CPU, RAM, and storage available to your project. The exact tiers and their prices are shown in the Cloud UI and on the Meilisearch pricing page.

General guidelines for choosing a tier:

Situation	Guidance
Index fits comfortably in RAM	Keep a tier where RAM exceeds your index size by at least 20%
High query volume (hundreds of QPS)	Choose a tier with more CPU cores
Large vector dimensions or many embedded documents	Prefer higher RAM tiers; vector indexes grow quickly
Development or staging environment	Use the smallest tier to minimize cost

When to scale up

Signs that your project needs more resources:

• Search latency (p95 or p99) increases during peak traffic
• Indexing tasks take significantly longer than usual
• Memory usage stays near 100% in the usage metrics dashboard
• CPU usage is consistently high during search-heavy periods

Changing the plan

1. Open your project in the Meilisearch Cloud dashboard.
2. Go to Infrastructure and find the Manage resources button.
3. Click on the dropdown to see all available options.

4. Select the desired tier from the plan picker.

5. Click Confirm. The change takes effect shortly. Search and indexing operations remain available during the transition on most plan changes.

Impact on billing

Resource-based projects are billed by the hour. When you change resource tiers, the new rate applies from the next hour. You are never double-billed: at most, you may be charged for a partial hour at the old rate before the new rate kicks in. See Pricing model for details.