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Infino Cloud is the same Infino retrieval engine you run locally, served as a fully-managed, object-storage-native hosted service. You get full-text, vector, hybrid, and SQL search over your data without running or sizing any storage or compute yourself. Data lives as Apache Parquet on object storage, and you pay for what you use. The API is identical to the open-source engine. A program written against connect("./data") or connect("s3://…") moves to the hosted service by changing only the connect target. See the Quickstart for the one-line change.

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What you get

  • Fully managed. No servers to provision, patch, or scale. Storage grows with your data, and table maintenance (optimize and gc) runs for you.
  • Object-storage-native. Your data is stored as standard Parquet on object storage, the same open format the engine uses locally. No proprietary lock-in.
  • The same retrieval surface. BM25, vector kNN, hybrid, and SQL over one copy of your data, indexed once. See Search.
  • Usage-based. You pay for storage and query usage rather than for provisioned, always-on capacity.

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When to choose it vs. self-hosting

Infino is open source, and you can always run the engine yourself against local disk or your own object-storage bucket. See Connect & storage for the self-hosted backends. Choose Infino Cloud when you want retrieval as a service: you would rather not operate storage, tune caches, or run maintenance, and you want to go from an API key to a working table in minutes. It suits teams that want to focus on their application rather than on running infrastructure. Self-host the open-source engine when you need the data and compute to stay entirely inside your own environment, you already operate object storage, or you want to embed the engine directly in your process. The code you write is the same either way, so you can start self-hosted and move to the hosted service later without rewriting your application.

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Next steps

Quickstart

Connect, provision a database, and run your first search.

Authentication

API keys, the Authorization header, and key rotation.

Architecture

How the service separates control, compute, and storage.

REST API

Not using an SDK? Drive Infino Cloud over plain HTTP — the OpenAPI reference.
Last modified on July 29, 2026