Heroku Rails Websolr, sunspot is not free in production?

Question

I've added sunspot gem in my application and tried to send it to production in heroku, but I'm trying to reindex my database, however, I'm getting an error. I did some more digging and I think I have to add websolr as an add-on? This costs $20/month. Is this the only option?

THanks

Answer 1

Founder of Websolr + Bonsai here (Heroku addons for Solr and Elasticsearch).

Rich's answer is pretty solid, with the exception of the SQL LIKE operator, which I do not recommend. The performance does not scale, and you're either going to sink in a lot more time than you might expect in order to eke out baseline search functionality. End result: a lot of time spent, and unhappy users.

Postgres full text search is a reasonable alternative, though the term analysis and result ranking will be lacking compared to Solr/Elasticsearch as your search traffic starts to grow in production.

You might also consider our sister service, Bonsai, which does offer a free Starter plan. It uses Elasticsearch, which means you'd want to use the official Ruby bindings for Elasticsearch rather than Sunspot.

Lastly, if you already have a production app on Heroku, you are welcome to create more than one index in your account, and share those indexes with your staging/qa and other apps.