I added semantic search to my React app without a backend (and it's under 1ms)

How I built browser-native semantic vector search using WASM — no server, no API keys, no per-query cost. Full code walkthrough with React.

My documentation site had search that sent every user query to Algolia. Fine for open source (free tier), annoying for a paid product where $1/1K searches compounds faster than you expect.

Fuse.js was the obvious alternative — runs in the browser, zero config. But Fuse.js is fuzzy text matching. A user typing "cancel my plan" will never find a doc titled "end your subscription." That's the gap I wanted to close.

What I wanted: search that understands meaning, runs entirely in the browser, and has zero per-query cost.

So I built altor-vec — HNSW vector search compiled to 54KB of WASM. No server. No API keys. The index is a static file on your CDN.