Search, realtime, and storage. No cluster to run.
altengine gives you three managed backend services as plain HTTP APIs — full-text Search, realtime Channels, and a Datastore document store. There's nothing to provision and nothing idling on your bill, and the first $3 of usage every month is free.
No credit card to start · First $3 free every month · Nothing to provision
Each one does a single job well
Index and query text, push messages to clients in realtime, and store JSON documents you can actually query. Three services, one API key, one bill — and no infrastructure to size, patch, or babysit.
Full-text search that just indexes and queries
Create an index, put documents in, run queries with the operators you already know. Fielded search, facets, sorting, and pagination — without standing up a search cluster.
- Structured documents with text, atom, number, and date fields
- An expressive query language — fielded terms, booleans, and ranges
- Facets, ranking, sorting, and pagination out of the box
- No cluster to provision — pay for storage and queries, nothing while idle
Realtime channels over a single WebSocket
Publish from your backend over plain HTTP; clients subscribe over a single WebSocket that can carry many channels at once. Fan-out is handled for you, and you're billed on message deliveries and connection time.
- Subscribe-only client sockets with short-lived, channel-scoped tokens
- HTTP publish from anywhere, fan-out to every subscriber
- One WebSocket carries many channels, with a ready-to-use subscribe URL
- Billed on message deliveries and connection time — nobody connected, no charge
A JSON document store with a query engine
Put JSON documents in, then filter, sort, and aggregate them with a bounded query engine — no SQL, no schema to declare up front. Namespaces give you an isolated store per tenant, with atomic transactions and point-in-time restore.
- Arbitrary JSON documents, keyed by a string or an auto-generated id
- Multi-field filters, sorting, keyset pagination, and grouped aggregates
- Atomic transactions with field-level, race-free increments
- Billed on writes, reads, and stored data — idle namespaces cost only their storage
Built to be boring in all the right ways
Just HTTP and JSON
REST over HTTPS, a bearer token, JSON in and out. No SDK to adopt and no client library standing between you and the service.
Fast & frugal
Quick to respond and easy on the bill — there's no always-on cluster, so an index you aren't querying costs only its storage.
First $3 free
The first $3 of usage every month is free, across all services. Most side projects never pay a cent.
One org, many keys
Organization-level API keys with scoped grants. Search, Channel, and Datastore today, with more managed services added as demand grows.
Secure by default
Short-lived tokens, per-instance signing, and least-privilege grants baked into the model, not bolted on.
Transparent usage
A live console shows exactly what you've used and what it costs — no mystery line items at month's end.
Coming from App Engine?
Search and Channel keep App Engine's semantics — the same query language, field types, facets, and sorting — over a clean REST/JSON API. Your queries and your schema carry over; what changes is the call layer, not the way you model search. Datastore keeps the familiar model but loosens the contract — any JSON object, joins, grouped aggregates, and strongly consistent reads. We wrote about why we built all three, and the longer story is here.
Start building on altengine
Spin up a Search index, a realtime Channel, or a Datastore namespace in minutes. Start free and grow into pricing that stays honest.
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