Tested Meilisearch recently, was a great experience, getting a multi-index search running in our frontend was very easy. Just wish they had an Australian instance, the closest is Singapore :(
I installed coolify on a VM (was featured here last week) and it had a one-click Meilisearch docker install. I sent 1,000,000 records to it "just worked" on a little $8/mo Hetzner instance.
I recently stood up the server in our k8s cluster and that part was also pretty easy, at least compared to elastic.
I used Elasticsearch 10 years ago and wasn’t a fan then, this last year decided to try Elastic Cloud and have been quite happy, a ton has matured over the years.
Reach out to the sales or CS team, depending on your workload we could open that region pretty quickly :D