Azure AI Search
Azure AI Search is a cloud search service for building rich search experiences over private, heterogeneous content. · Azure · AI
Overview
Azure AI Search provides a managed search-as-a-service platform with AI enrichment, ideal for prototyping and learning but not suitable for production-scale workloads on the free tier.
Good fit
Use when you need to prototype or test search features in Azure without incurring costs.
- prototyping
- learning
- demos
- internal tools
Not a fit
Avoid for production workloads or large-scale search needs due to strict resource and SLA limitations.
- production workloads
- large datasets
- high availability requirements
Quickstart · 5 steps
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Create a new Azure AI Search service using the Free tier.
- Define and import your data source (e.g., Azure Blob Storage, SQL Database).
- Create an index and configure fields.
- Upload or connect your data and test search queries.
Other free ai options
Free tierWhat you get freeRiskCard
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2,000 code completions per month · 50 chat requests per month (including Copilot Edits) · Agent mode, CLI, and MCP servers included with limited usage
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Google Cloud · AI
Sessions run up to 12 hours, depending on availability · GPU/TPU access heavily restricted on the free tier · Exact resource limits are not published and vary over time
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Google Cloud · AI
Free input and output tokens on supported models · Limited access to certain models · 5,000 free Google Search grounding requests/month, shared across Gemini 3.x models
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Hugging Face · AI
Unlimited public repos (best-effort free storage) · 100GB private storage · Storage limits apply across models, datasets, and buckets
Billing risk: None
No card