Glean Infrastructure Cost Breakdown: What a 20-User POC Tells Us About Scalability and Spend

When evaluating an enterprise search platform, performance and features often take center stage—but the real, long-term cost frequently lies in the infrastructure. A recent Glean proof of concept (POC) highlights just how costly that can be, even for small teams.

In a 20-user POC, Glean required 26 high-memory compute nodes in a bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployment on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That’s a surprisingly large footprint—and the resulting infrastructure cost to the company exceeded $10,000 per month in cloud spend alone.

This isn’t an isolated case. It reflects how Glean’s architecture scales—and why it may not be a sustainable choice for cost-conscious organizations.

Why Is Glean’s Infrastructure Cost So High?

High Glean infrastructure costs stem from how the platform handles indexing, data processing, and machine learning. Even to support just 20 users in an initial trial, Glean required a cluster of 26 high-memory servers—an enormous scale for such a small team. Several factors likely contributed:

Heavy indexing demands: Glean may crawl and process tens of millions of documents, especially if large, content-rich data sources are connected.
Resource-intensive architecture: Organizations end up paying not just for storage, but for constant re-indexing, embedding refresh cycles, and maintaining large clusters in the cloud, driving up operational costs significantly.
Over-provisioning for performance: Glean sometimes deploys large clusters during trials to maintain high performance, even when actual usage is minimal.

This translates into significantly higher cloud spending. In a BYOC setup, that infrastructure burden—and the cost—falls entirely on your team, not the vendor.

Running the Numbers on Glean Infrastructure Costs

Let’s assume a company used n2-highmem-32 nodes (32 vCPUs, 256 GB RAM) for this Glean POC:

Estimated cost per node: ~$5/hour (depending on region and usage)
Total hourly cost: 26 nodes × $5 = $130/hour
Monthly cost (24/7): $130/hour × 730 hours = $94,900/month

Even with committed use discounts or smaller instance types, the infrastructure cost still amounts to tens of thousands of dollars per month—a substantial expense for supporting just 20 users.

Is This Normal for Enterprise Search?

Not even close. A deployment for 20 users would typically require 2–4 medium nodes, not 26 high-memory machines.

A well-architected platform can often run efficiently on just 2–4 medium-sized nodes.
Most SaaS-based search solutions support hundreds of users on shared infrastructure without requiring dedicated clusters.
Requiring 26 high-memory nodes for a small team points to an architecture that simply doesn’t scale cost-effectively.

And yet, this isn’t uncommon with Glean search, which can be resource-hungry even in small deployments. While Glean offers many enterprise-grade features, its architecture doesn’t scale efficiently in BYOC environments.

When you combine this infrastructure load with a lack of transparency in Glean’s pricing model, it becomes difficult to forecast spend—let alone manage it.

Glean Infrastructure Cost: A Scalability Challenge

The high infrastructure cost in a Glean POC raises concerns about long-term scalability:

What happens when you scale from 20 to 200 or 2,000 users?
Will infrastructure costs continue to multiply with headcount?
Can your cloud budget realistically absorb these costs month after month?

If the cost of supporting a small pilot is already approaching six figures, a full enterprise rollout could become financially unsustainable.

Enterprise Search Pricing: Why Infrastructure Shouldn’t Break Your Budget

More organizations are taking a closer look at total enterprise search pricing, beyond just software licensing. Between compute, storage, and scaling, infrastructure costs can quickly outpace the price of the product—especially with platforms that weren’t built with efficiency in mind.

That’s where Glean alternatives like GoSearch offer a clear advantage. GoSearch delivers AI-powered search without the infrastructure overhead. Designed for cost-effective scaling, GoSearch lets you unlock the value of your organizational data without blowing your cloud budget.

GoSearch: A Leaner Alternative to Glean

At GoSearch, we’ve engineered our platform to eliminate the infrastructure inefficiencies that make Glean costly to run. You get the same enterprise-grade, AI-powered search experience—semantic relevance, embeddings, and natural language understanding—but with a significantly lighter, more efficient footprint.

Here’s how GoSearch compares:

No overprovisioning: We never require 20+ nodes for a simple POC.
Smarter scaling: Our infrastructure adapts based on your actual usage and document volume, not arbitrary defaults.
Federated search: No data indexing options utilize real-time retrieval to surface workspace knowledge without resource-intensive storage.
Advanced features, lower cost: You get powerful semantic search capabilities—without the heavy infrastructure or high cloud bill.

Whether you’re running a small pilot or rolling out across your entire organization, GoSearch is built to keep your infrastructure lean, your performance strong, and your enterprise search pricing predictable.

Key Takeaways

A recent Glean POC for just 20 users required 26 high-memory servers, resulting in an estimated $10K/month infrastructure cost.
These high costs stem from Glean’s resource-intensive architecture and a tendency to overprovision, even for small deployments.
In contrast, most enterprise search platforms can support a team of this size with just 2–4 medium-sized nodes.
Glean’s approach raises concerns about scalability—especially for organizations with larger teams or limited cloud budgets.
GoSearch offers a cost-effective, AI-powered alternative that delivers the same advanced capabilities—without the infrastructure burden.

Explore a More Scalable, Affordable Enterprise Search Platform

If you’re evaluating enterprise search solutions and concerned about rising infrastructure cost, GoSearch is designed to deliver maximum performance with minimal cloud overhead.

Ready to reduce your infrastructure spend? Request a demo and see how GoSearch outperforms Glean on cost, performance, and scalability.

Schedule a demo