10 ms·

Algolia introduces pay-as-you-go pricing for search

155 points by jlemoine 6y ago

julienreszka 6y ago
This is awesome. Now that it exists seems like inevitable.
iambateman 6y ago
We just jumped on with algolia and we love it (4 days in) Trying to figure out if the new pricing model is going to skyrocket costs or not. FWIW we are on the old $29/mo plan for the moment. But Algolia is incredible.
- ykevinator 6y ago
  I don't get why algolia exists and why people pay for it
  - Znafon 6y ago
    They have a useful list of feature that you can look at: https://www.algolia.com/products/search/ https://www.algolia.com/products/search/ It's basically a service that you can use so users can search objects in your database, a bit like Google but just for your website or application.
    - rvnx 6y ago
      Isn't it exactly what a managed Elasticsearch does ?
      - BrigadierG 6y ago
        Yes but vastly faster, and requires less setup.
- scribu 6y ago
  Where you using a different search solution previously? What was it?
  - iambateman 6y ago
    We were using Google Custom Search. So Algolia is a big upgrade.
- dvdhnt 6y ago
  For what it's worth, we do around ~5.1k queries on App Search and pay something like $200. Looking at Algolia (which we didn't go with because it was too expensive), the cost would be about even right now ($1.50 premium * 6). However, that doesn't include the elastic or kibana instance we get at the moment. Hopefully the cost doesn't grow too sharply.
  - abri 6y ago
    How come you're paying $200 for 5.1k queries on App Search? 5k doesn't seem like a big number so I imagine the lower tier plans/configs like the $20-30 plans should be enough right? Right now I have the lowest configuration and I pay $25/month.
    - dvdhnt 6y ago
      Woah. Err I don't handle billing but it looks like we got App Search through Elastic and it comes with the entire ELK stack behind it. I know they are moving App Search to some kind of Elastic Enterprise service, perhaps we're dealing with that instead? We use the analytics, clicks, and suggestion API's - idk if those are included at the base level or not.
JustARandomGuy 6y ago
Love the change. I really like the "annual commitments" pricing - I love it when I can pre-reserve a certain amount of performance and get a discount for it.
atonse 6y ago
We've loved algolia for the 2-3 sites we've used it for. The speed is unbeatable. I wish we could've used it for one of our HIPAA use cases (patient data). I could've rolled out powerful search for an internal site in a day, but instead I'm having to build in postgres full text search and looking longingly at them.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  No hosted version for businesses who are running in a regulated environment?
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Is elastic search not an option? I read they are compliant with hippa and other laws. There are many open source alternatives to algolia too. I am using meilli search - https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch atm. It works pretty well without taking huge resources. Sonic is interesting too if you want something minimal - https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic
    - JoshGlazebrook 6y ago
      meilli looks very promising! Thanks for this.
- kolencherry 6y ago
  Doesn't Algolia offer BAAs? I thought I had seen it as part of their Enterprise plan.
  - jlemoine 6y ago
    Yes indeed, it is recent (since 2020)
- SigmundA 6y ago
  I wish some more effort would be put into Postgres full text search seems to have stagnated somewhat, it does a lot but is also lacking compared to say Lucene. Not that its going to be as good as Algolia but it could be a whole lot better for many use cases specifically TF/IDF and BM25 scoring: https://github.com/postgrespro/rum https://github.com/postgrespro/rum
disqard 6y ago
As somebody with a small side-project that would benefit from search, this sounds like a pretty good deal! Will have to give this a spin and see.
kabes 6y ago
So you basically only pay based on amount of queries? Dataset size doesn't matter? We have an expensive elastic search setup. It's expensive because of the amount of data it contains. But we don't run a lot of queries. So with algolia this would basically be free and potentially faster?
- gildas 6y ago
  It's written in small print under the screenshot of the "units widget" here [1]: "Number of indexed records is capped at roughly 10% of annual search volume. See FAQ for more information." The FAQ says: "When using Annual Commitment pricing (minimum one year commitment and 1,200 units), each unit contains 1,000 searches x 12 = 12,000 searches during the year, and 100 x 12 = 1,200 maximum of records at any point in the year." [1] https://www.algolia.com/pricing/ https://www.algolia.com/pricing/
  - gberger 6y ago
    So for 1 million records, you need to spend $1k/month. Hmm.
    - gildas 6y ago
      The overage fees are also a mystery, the FAQ only says: "If you exceed your committed usage, there are overages that will be charged."
    - beering 6y ago
      1 million records doesn't seem like all that much. If each document is 1 MB, that's only 1 GB of indexed data. Does Algolia add a lot of value on top of that?
      - PudgePacket 6y ago
        1 MB * 1,000,000 = 1 TB
  - kabes 6y ago
wolco 6y ago
A dollar for 1,000 queries. A million queries costs $10000 dollars? For that money there are so many better options.
- mitchbob 6y ago
  And those are?
  - theturtletalks 6y ago
    Elastic Search Meili Sonic Depending on your use case, a front-end search library would work too: Elasticlunr JS-search Flexsearch Fuse
  - clamprecht 6y ago
    Searchify.com (I'm the founder), you pay per number of documents only. Not number of queries. http://www.searchify.com/plans/ http://www.searchify.com/plans/
  - jabo 6y ago
    There are also free & open source options like Typesense: https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense
  - zelly 6y ago
    Elastic Search Lucene Sphinx Solr And thousands of other ones made by hobbyists, but those are the mature (as in since the 90s) ones. For instance Craiglist uses Sphinx.
    - snikolaev 6y ago
      > For instance Craiglist uses Sphinx Actually Manticore Search (fork of Sphinx)
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      For a quick search engine it's hard to beat Sphinx. I especially love that you can just point it at a database and give it a query and it will just work.
jhgg 6y ago
Why the indirection in the pricing page. Like, if a unit is 1,000 searches/month, why not just put that in the matrix. Free = 10,000 searches/month. Standard = $1 per 1,000 searches. ... Pay as you go: 1,000 - 10,000 searches = Free 11,000 - 100,000 searches = $1.00/ 1,000 searches The whole to unit conversion really just adds a level of indirection that I don't understand. This was further confused by units having different colored dots depending on the plan, making me think there were 3 different kinds of units. A slider would be nice, let me slide it to what my search volume for a given month would be, and tell me how much that would cost, factoring in volume discounts. Additionally, this is a huge red flag: > If you exceed your committed usage, there are overages that will be charged. What are the overages??! Why is it not just sliding back to pay-as-you-go pricing, like reservations for say EC2 work. ---- As an aside, we use Algolia to power some search features at Discord. This new pricing structure looks to be an order of magnitude more expensive (we fall under the "contact sales" usage here...) Luckily we're grandfathered in or we'd have to consider putting a cloudflare worker in-front of this and leveraging that to do caching of common hot queries to reduce cost.
- alooPotato 6y ago
  We (Streak) are in the same boat. Looks like we'd be paying approx half a million dollars a month on their new pricing which would be ~100x more than we are paying now. Haven't heard from our enterprise rep but starting to get nervous... Sounds like the new pricing is for their ecommerce customers given how much value they provide them, doesn't seem to make sense anymore for SaaS use cases.
  - jabo 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, could you expand on how it doesn't make sense for SaaS use cases?
    - ysavir 6y ago
      Not the GP, but I figure their point is as follows: If I'm running an e-commerce website, I don't mind pay-per-search since those searches may turn into sales, so the cost is justified. My income scales with search count, and the Algolia price is part of user acquisition costs. If I'm running a SaaS business, the search is a feature for customers who have already paid, so I don't see any further returns from the search being used. The more a client uses search, the less I'm profiting from having them as a client. They could potentially even cost me money to service them!
grouseway 6y ago
For comparison, the old free plan used to be 10k records plus 100k searches. That would be $100/month now. I think the new plan makes sense if you're selling to sites with purchase intent, but for searching knowledgebases it seems like it's way too expensive -- the value per search just isn't there. Especially when using instant searching and counting each slightly debounced keystroke as a search.
- karterk 6y ago
  I've been working on an open source alternative. It's dead simple to setup and run (including raft based clustering). It also integrates seamlessly with Instantsearch.js library. Would love to hear your feedback on Typesense: https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense
  - grouseway 6y ago
    Tried it out with about 10k short docs and it works pretty well as a potentional algolia replacement. I had to use 'sort_by' : '_text_match:desc' to get good results. I couldn't find a way to create synonyms, is this possible? Is it also possible to control typo sensitivity like algolia? e.g. min chars for 1 typo, min chars for 2 typos. The curation features looks handy, but I haven't tried it yet. Install and config was a breeze which is appreciated. I hope it takes off for you. Nice work.
    - karterk 6y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. Synonyms is on the immediate roadmap, but not available at the moment. > Is it also possible to control typo sensitivity You can control overall number of typose with ?num_typos=1 -- there is no way to define min chars for a specific typo. The engine does make some intelligent decisions to optimize. For example, for a 2 letter query it does not use a num_typos=2 even if that is specified. Glad to hear about the setup. Will continue to improve.
- jlemoine 6y ago
  (I am the CTO and co-founder) This is not exactly true, the previous free plan was 10k records and 100k API calls (counting all indexing operations and all search API call). We now only count search request and we did a simulation on our existing free plan base, offering 10 units cover all of them. Btw, we keep offering more quota for opensource projects.
AznHisoka 6y ago
These guys are probably planning to IPO next year. And when they file the S1 they can claim they had 100% year over year growth (mostly due to price increases).
- jlemoine 6y ago
  (I am the CTO and Co-founder). I can reassure you this is not the case, I don't have visibility on when we will do an IPO and we grandfather all existing customers. We always did that and we still have customers today on 2013 pricing! It bring a lot of complexity internally. We released this new pricing only because we are convinced this is better for customers.
  - BrigadierG 6y ago
    I signed up for an account just to respond to this. I run a small, low-budget, lean startup and we were banking on the starter plan lasting us at least 6 months as we gradually scaled. You cited in the blog post that making this change was supposed to "reduce entry costs" but how has this happened? Just the limit of the old free plan would cost you more than the old starter plan! The limit of the old starter plan would cost like 7x as much now. Can you give a single use case under which the new pricing is cheaper for entry level customers?
    - jlemoine 6y ago
      I understand your perception, pricing and perception is hard. I want to reassure you that this is really way cheaper for people to start using the product and as a company it was a huge project to lunch this pricing, especially when you lower the price for such a large portion of users. The previous pricing was based on indexing operations + search operations. The new pricing is only based on search request and in a lot of situation N search operations = 1 search request (disjunctive faceting, federated search, etc.). At the end, for the big majority of free users (> 99%) they have as many or more search request in the 10 free units than in the old plan.
hitekker 6y ago
Ah, “Value-based” pricing, or, how much a company can gouge their customers before their customers change vendors.
momokavar 6y ago
Why do people want this product? If I use the demo search on their homepage, theres several annoyances on mobile that made me nope out. Is it because backend free form search queries are hard? or do people use this primarily for the frontend quality? Edited for typo.
- momokavar 6y ago
  It was an honest question, I’ve read a bunch about it now and have no idea why you would want to pay so much for this. Is it the typo handling? Is there really no straightforward free search tech out there?
- ponker 6y ago
  Because it gets customers to the product they want faster than anything else in e-commerce. Selling shoes or something online? Algolia will earn back its cost in conversion.
AOsborn 6y ago
This is a huge increase in pricing for all our customers using Algolia. https://web.archive.org/web/20200620142025/https://www.algolia.com/pricing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200620142025/https://www.algol... The previous Starter tier pricing was a lot cheaper. Most important point to note is that additional searches were closer to 10k/$1 vs the proposed 1000 (additional 100k operations: $10/month). Yes, these were 'operations' not searches' but the mapping between operations vs searches doesn't appear to be anywhere near 10-1.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  I see it like they're chasing the lower end of the market like single dev projects that don't want to spend much - which I guess makes sense. But for us this definitely would be a lot more expensive.
  - arichard123 6y ago
    Well, if so they've failed in my case. I've got a customer doing £1m annual turnover on e-commerce, and we were about to start an integration with Algolia. The new pricing has stopped that from going ahead. I've been asked to find an alternative.
    - mkcg 6y ago
      What is your stack ? I made a simple Proof-of-concept of a PHP backend based on Redisearch compatible with the Instantsearch.js library. You can take a look at it here : https://github.com/MKCG/algolia-on-redisearch/tree/master/api https://github.com/MKCG/algolia-on-redisearch/tree/master/ap... With the Covid crisis we were no longer able to pay 3K per month for a basic search engine and now we are using a solution based on this on production (> 30M search/month).
- jlemoine 6y ago
  This is not the case, the price of unit decrease with volume and you can have a big discount if you want to commit to a yearly (similar to AWS/GCP/Azure)
jschumacher 6y ago
Interesting change. Disclaimer, I joined one of Algolia's competitors (http://sajari.com http://sajari.com) 6 months ago and we are about to release a new product and change our pricing, so I've been thinking about this a lot. Having worked at Atlassian before, I understand how important simple pricing can be. My personal (and probably biased opinion) is that this is a move in the wrong direction. It appears simpler on the surface, but the concept of a unit and understanding all the disclaimers associated with it make the pricing more complicated than before. If I have to read the faq to understand what I'm getting, it's too complicated IMHO. Also, it seems other features, like analytics retention, crawler, have moved into add-ons, which requires you to contact sales to find out how much you'll pay. More granular pricing does provide more flexibility, but it also reduces predictability, which can be important especially in small to mid-sized businesses. I'm curious to understand how people feel about "usage pricing" vs. "tiered pricing" where you know exactly what you are paying each month? Which ones do you prefer? We are still finalising our own pricing, any feedback would be very much welcome.
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  THIS ! I feel many times business put the "business-complexities" onto the client, in this case the search-unit and although the CTO explained why (I gloss over it) as a customer , I don't need to understand what makes it difficult in your business nor do I want to know all your internal jargon and limitations. I the customer understand searches and searches per month. Don't make me think ! Like going to a restaurant: I don't want to know the whole nine yards story as to why you don't have lasagne today since one of the guys didn't show up for work and he was supposed to make the sauce and another guy was over his government allowed working hours. All this might be true and adequately explained why there is no lasagne, but now I need to also understand about employees, government working hours and and and. Just give me lasagne or not :) It's almost always a red-herring if you need to "explain" your pricing or use internal-company-jargon in your pricing-pages.
  - andriosr 6y ago
    I prefer 1000x a complex pricing page than having to talk to a sales rep to get the first sense of pricing. Each industry has different aspects of how much value they get from a product, the effort to try to encapsulate these aspects into a single pricing functions is much appreciated. We face the same challenge with Decimals.app - should be adding pricing soon as well
cc_stoic 6y ago
this is serverless search. I love it
- winrid 6y ago
  For the user, correct, since you just plop a widget into a page client side.
hartator 6y ago
Unit pricing seems complicated and arbitrary.
- jschumacher 6y ago
  What is your preferred pricing model and why?
kumarski 6y ago
While I love algolia, I hate the way it is implemented on producthunt.
sonic182 6y ago
People, just use Doofinder -> https://www.doofinder.com/ https://www.doofinder.com/
sonic182 6y ago
People, just use -> https://tinyurl.com/y8qc6tfx https://tinyurl.com/y8qc6tfx I can't write the name because is caped by algolia
lbj 6y ago
Well thats no good. I will say, that for the customers Ive had who have suffered big problems with their search engines, Algolia has always been the solution. It just works, so its worth paying for. Im a little concerned that this change puts the price over the top.
ctx_ 6y ago
Everyone seems really hyped with Algolia, before and after the pricing update but the major drawback i've seen is the pricing model that is still a big issue IMO. Given you have 10K documents, if you want to make a "sort by something" you have to create a replica with another ranking configuration. So if you want 4 sort criteria, you'll be billed for 40K document even if you have only 10k at start. I've looked in competitors like Swiftype and even them point out this issue in the pricing page : "Index once, sort all you want (No need to replicate engines to sort or filter your data in different ways. Once your data is indexed, it can be filtered, faceted and sorted at will.)"

155 points by jlemoine 6y ago

This is awesome. Now that it exists seems like inevitable.

We just jumped on with algolia and we love it (4 days in) Trying to figure out if the new pricing model is going to skyrocket costs or not. FWIW we are on the old $29/mo plan for the moment. But Algolia is incredible.

ykevinator 6y ago
I don't get why algolia exists and why people pay for it
- Znafon 6y ago
  They have a useful list of feature that you can look at: https://www.algolia.com/products/search/ https://www.algolia.com/products/search/ It's basically a service that you can use so users can search objects in your database, a bit like Google but just for your website or application.
  - rvnx 6y ago
    Isn't it exactly what a managed Elasticsearch does ?
    - BrigadierG 6y ago
      Yes but vastly faster, and requires less setup.
scribu 6y ago
Where you using a different search solution previously? What was it?
- iambateman 6y ago
  We were using Google Custom Search. So Algolia is a big upgrade.
dvdhnt 6y ago
For what it's worth, we do around ~5.1k queries on App Search and pay something like $200. Looking at Algolia (which we didn't go with because it was too expensive), the cost would be about even right now ($1.50 premium * 6). However, that doesn't include the elastic or kibana instance we get at the moment. Hopefully the cost doesn't grow too sharply.
- abri 6y ago
  How come you're paying $200 for 5.1k queries on App Search? 5k doesn't seem like a big number so I imagine the lower tier plans/configs like the $20-30 plans should be enough right? Right now I have the lowest configuration and I pay $25/month.
  - dvdhnt 6y ago
    Woah. Err I don't handle billing but it looks like we got App Search through Elastic and it comes with the entire ELK stack behind it. I know they are moving App Search to some kind of Elastic Enterprise service, perhaps we're dealing with that instead? We use the analytics, clicks, and suggestion API's - idk if those are included at the base level or not.

JustARandomGuy 6y ago

Love the change. I really like the "annual commitments" pricing - I love it when I can pre-reserve a certain amount of performance and get a discount for it.

atonse 6y ago

We've loved algolia for the 2-3 sites we've used it for. The speed is unbeatable. I wish we could've used it for one of our HIPAA use cases (patient data). I could've rolled out powerful search for an internal site in a day, but instead I'm having to build in postgres full text search and looking longingly at them.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
No hosted version for businesses who are running in a regulated environment?
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Is elastic search not an option? I read they are compliant with hippa and other laws. There are many open source alternatives to algolia too. I am using meilli search - https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch atm. It works pretty well without taking huge resources. Sonic is interesting too if you want something minimal - https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic
  - JoshGlazebrook 6y ago
    meilli looks very promising! Thanks for this.
kolencherry 6y ago
Doesn't Algolia offer BAAs? I thought I had seen it as part of their Enterprise plan.
- jlemoine 6y ago
  Yes indeed, it is recent (since 2020)
SigmundA 6y ago
I wish some more effort would be put into Postgres full text search seems to have stagnated somewhat, it does a lot but is also lacking compared to say Lucene. Not that its going to be as good as Algolia but it could be a whole lot better for many use cases specifically TF/IDF and BM25 scoring: https://github.com/postgrespro/rum https://github.com/postgrespro/rum

disqard 6y ago

As somebody with a small side-project that would benefit from search, this sounds like a pretty good deal! Will have to give this a spin and see.

kabes 6y ago

So you basically only pay based on amount of queries? Dataset size doesn't matter? We have an expensive elastic search setup. It's expensive because of the amount of data it contains. But we don't run a lot of queries. So with algolia this would basically be free and potentially faster?

gildas 6y ago
It's written in small print under the screenshot of the "units widget" here [1]: "Number of indexed records is capped at roughly 10% of annual search volume. See FAQ for more information." The FAQ says: "When using Annual Commitment pricing (minimum one year commitment and 1,200 units), each unit contains 1,000 searches x 12 = 12,000 searches during the year, and 100 x 12 = 1,200 maximum of records at any point in the year." [1] https://www.algolia.com/pricing/ https://www.algolia.com/pricing/
- gberger 6y ago
  So for 1 million records, you need to spend $1k/month. Hmm.
  - gildas 6y ago
    The overage fees are also a mystery, the FAQ only says: "If you exceed your committed usage, there are overages that will be charged."
  - beering 6y ago
    1 million records doesn't seem like all that much. If each document is 1 MB, that's only 1 GB of indexed data. Does Algolia add a lot of value on top of that?
    - PudgePacket 6y ago
      1 MB * 1,000,000 = 1 TB
- kabes 6y ago

wolco 6y ago

A dollar for 1,000 queries. A million queries costs $10000 dollars? For that money there are so many better options.

mitchbob 6y ago
And those are?
- theturtletalks 6y ago
  Elastic Search Meili Sonic Depending on your use case, a front-end search library would work too: Elasticlunr JS-search Flexsearch Fuse
- clamprecht 6y ago
  Searchify.com (I'm the founder), you pay per number of documents only. Not number of queries. http://www.searchify.com/plans/ http://www.searchify.com/plans/
- jabo 6y ago
  There are also free & open source options like Typesense: https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense
- zelly 6y ago
  Elastic Search Lucene Sphinx Solr And thousands of other ones made by hobbyists, but those are the mature (as in since the 90s) ones. For instance Craiglist uses Sphinx.
  - snikolaev 6y ago
    > For instance Craiglist uses Sphinx Actually Manticore Search (fork of Sphinx)
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    For a quick search engine it's hard to beat Sphinx. I especially love that you can just point it at a database and give it a query and it will just work.

jhgg 6y ago

Why the indirection in the pricing page. Like, if a unit is 1,000 searches/month, why not just put that in the matrix. Free = 10,000 searches/month. Standard = $1 per 1,000 searches. ... Pay as you go: 1,000 - 10,000 searches = Free 11,000 - 100,000 searches = $1.00/ 1,000 searches The whole to unit conversion really just adds a level of indirection that I don't understand. This was further confused by units having different colored dots depending on the plan, making me think there were 3 different kinds of units. A slider would be nice, let me slide it to what my search volume for a given month would be, and tell me how much that would cost, factoring in volume discounts. Additionally, this is a huge red flag: > If you exceed your committed usage, there are overages that will be charged. What are the overages??! Why is it not just sliding back to pay-as-you-go pricing, like reservations for say EC2 work. ---- As an aside, we use Algolia to power some search features at Discord. This new pricing structure looks to be an order of magnitude more expensive (we fall under the "contact sales" usage here...) Luckily we're grandfathered in or we'd have to consider putting a cloudflare worker in-front of this and leveraging that to do caching of common hot queries to reduce cost.

alooPotato 6y ago
We (Streak) are in the same boat. Looks like we'd be paying approx half a million dollars a month on their new pricing which would be ~100x more than we are paying now. Haven't heard from our enterprise rep but starting to get nervous... Sounds like the new pricing is for their ecommerce customers given how much value they provide them, doesn't seem to make sense anymore for SaaS use cases.
- jabo 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, could you expand on how it doesn't make sense for SaaS use cases?
  - ysavir 6y ago
    Not the GP, but I figure their point is as follows: If I'm running an e-commerce website, I don't mind pay-per-search since those searches may turn into sales, so the cost is justified. My income scales with search count, and the Algolia price is part of user acquisition costs. If I'm running a SaaS business, the search is a feature for customers who have already paid, so I don't see any further returns from the search being used. The more a client uses search, the less I'm profiting from having them as a client. They could potentially even cost me money to service them!

grouseway 6y ago

For comparison, the old free plan used to be 10k records plus 100k searches. That would be $100/month now. I think the new plan makes sense if you're selling to sites with purchase intent, but for searching knowledgebases it seems like it's way too expensive -- the value per search just isn't there. Especially when using instant searching and counting each slightly debounced keystroke as a search.

karterk 6y ago
I've been working on an open source alternative. It's dead simple to setup and run (including raft based clustering). It also integrates seamlessly with Instantsearch.js library. Would love to hear your feedback on Typesense: https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense
- grouseway 6y ago
  Tried it out with about 10k short docs and it works pretty well as a potentional algolia replacement. I had to use 'sort_by' : '_text_match:desc' to get good results. I couldn't find a way to create synonyms, is this possible? Is it also possible to control typo sensitivity like algolia? e.g. min chars for 1 typo, min chars for 2 typos. The curation features looks handy, but I haven't tried it yet. Install and config was a breeze which is appreciated. I hope it takes off for you. Nice work.
  - karterk 6y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. Synonyms is on the immediate roadmap, but not available at the moment. > Is it also possible to control typo sensitivity You can control overall number of typose with ?num_typos=1 -- there is no way to define min chars for a specific typo. The engine does make some intelligent decisions to optimize. For example, for a 2 letter query it does not use a num_typos=2 even if that is specified. Glad to hear about the setup. Will continue to improve.
jlemoine 6y ago
(I am the CTO and co-founder) This is not exactly true, the previous free plan was 10k records and 100k API calls (counting all indexing operations and all search API call). We now only count search request and we did a simulation on our existing free plan base, offering 10 units cover all of them. Btw, we keep offering more quota for opensource projects.

AznHisoka 6y ago

These guys are probably planning to IPO next year. And when they file the S1 they can claim they had 100% year over year growth (mostly due to price increases).

jlemoine 6y ago
(I am the CTO and Co-founder). I can reassure you this is not the case, I don't have visibility on when we will do an IPO and we grandfather all existing customers. We always did that and we still have customers today on 2013 pricing! It bring a lot of complexity internally. We released this new pricing only because we are convinced this is better for customers.
- BrigadierG 6y ago
  I signed up for an account just to respond to this. I run a small, low-budget, lean startup and we were banking on the starter plan lasting us at least 6 months as we gradually scaled. You cited in the blog post that making this change was supposed to "reduce entry costs" but how has this happened? Just the limit of the old free plan would cost you more than the old starter plan! The limit of the old starter plan would cost like 7x as much now. Can you give a single use case under which the new pricing is cheaper for entry level customers?
  - jlemoine 6y ago
    I understand your perception, pricing and perception is hard. I want to reassure you that this is really way cheaper for people to start using the product and as a company it was a huge project to lunch this pricing, especially when you lower the price for such a large portion of users. The previous pricing was based on indexing operations + search operations. The new pricing is only based on search request and in a lot of situation N search operations = 1 search request (disjunctive faceting, federated search, etc.). At the end, for the big majority of free users (> 99%) they have as many or more search request in the 10 free units than in the old plan.

hitekker 6y ago

Ah, “Value-based” pricing, or, how much a company can gouge their customers before their customers change vendors.

momokavar 6y ago

Why do people want this product? If I use the demo search on their homepage, theres several annoyances on mobile that made me nope out. Is it because backend free form search queries are hard? or do people use this primarily for the frontend quality? Edited for typo.

momokavar 6y ago
It was an honest question, I’ve read a bunch about it now and have no idea why you would want to pay so much for this. Is it the typo handling? Is there really no straightforward free search tech out there?
ponker 6y ago
Because it gets customers to the product they want faster than anything else in e-commerce. Selling shoes or something online? Algolia will earn back its cost in conversion.

AOsborn 6y ago

This is a huge increase in pricing for all our customers using Algolia. https://web.archive.org/web/20200620142025/https://www.algolia.com/pricing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200620142025/https://www.algol... The previous Starter tier pricing was a lot cheaper. Most important point to note is that additional searches were closer to 10k/$1 vs the proposed 1000 (additional 100k operations: $10/month). Yes, these were 'operations' not searches' but the mapping between operations vs searches doesn't appear to be anywhere near 10-1.

dawnerd 6y ago
I see it like they're chasing the lower end of the market like single dev projects that don't want to spend much - which I guess makes sense. But for us this definitely would be a lot more expensive.
- arichard123 6y ago
  Well, if so they've failed in my case. I've got a customer doing £1m annual turnover on e-commerce, and we were about to start an integration with Algolia. The new pricing has stopped that from going ahead. I've been asked to find an alternative.
  - mkcg 6y ago
    What is your stack ? I made a simple Proof-of-concept of a PHP backend based on Redisearch compatible with the Instantsearch.js library. You can take a look at it here : https://github.com/MKCG/algolia-on-redisearch/tree/master/api https://github.com/MKCG/algolia-on-redisearch/tree/master/ap... With the Covid crisis we were no longer able to pay 3K per month for a basic search engine and now we are using a solution based on this on production (> 30M search/month).
jlemoine 6y ago
This is not the case, the price of unit decrease with volume and you can have a big discount if you want to commit to a yearly (similar to AWS/GCP/Azure)

jschumacher 6y ago

Interesting change. Disclaimer, I joined one of Algolia's competitors (http://sajari.com http://sajari.com) 6 months ago and we are about to release a new product and change our pricing, so I've been thinking about this a lot. Having worked at Atlassian before, I understand how important simple pricing can be. My personal (and probably biased opinion) is that this is a move in the wrong direction. It appears simpler on the surface, but the concept of a unit and understanding all the disclaimers associated with it make the pricing more complicated than before. If I have to read the faq to understand what I'm getting, it's too complicated IMHO. Also, it seems other features, like analytics retention, crawler, have moved into add-ons, which requires you to contact sales to find out how much you'll pay. More granular pricing does provide more flexibility, but it also reduces predictability, which can be important especially in small to mid-sized businesses. I'm curious to understand how people feel about "usage pricing" vs. "tiered pricing" where you know exactly what you are paying each month? Which ones do you prefer? We are still finalising our own pricing, any feedback would be very much welcome.

rawoke083600 6y ago
THIS ! I feel many times business put the "business-complexities" onto the client, in this case the search-unit and although the CTO explained why (I gloss over it) as a customer , I don't need to understand what makes it difficult in your business nor do I want to know all your internal jargon and limitations. I the customer understand searches and searches per month. Don't make me think ! Like going to a restaurant: I don't want to know the whole nine yards story as to why you don't have lasagne today since one of the guys didn't show up for work and he was supposed to make the sauce and another guy was over his government allowed working hours. All this might be true and adequately explained why there is no lasagne, but now I need to also understand about employees, government working hours and and and. Just give me lasagne or not :) It's almost always a red-herring if you need to "explain" your pricing or use internal-company-jargon in your pricing-pages.
- andriosr 6y ago
  I prefer 1000x a complex pricing page than having to talk to a sales rep to get the first sense of pricing. Each industry has different aspects of how much value they get from a product, the effort to try to encapsulate these aspects into a single pricing functions is much appreciated. We face the same challenge with Decimals.app - should be adding pricing soon as well

cc_stoic 6y ago

this is serverless search. I love it

winrid 6y ago
For the user, correct, since you just plop a widget into a page client side.

hartator 6y ago

Unit pricing seems complicated and arbitrary.

jschumacher 6y ago
What is your preferred pricing model and why?

kumarski 6y ago

While I love algolia, I hate the way it is implemented on producthunt.

sonic182 6y ago

People, just use Doofinder -> https://www.doofinder.com/ https://www.doofinder.com/

sonic182 6y ago

People, just use -> https://tinyurl.com/y8qc6tfx https://tinyurl.com/y8qc6tfx I can't write the name because is caped by algolia

lbj 6y ago

Well thats no good. I will say, that for the customers Ive had who have suffered big problems with their search engines, Algolia has always been the solution. It just works, so its worth paying for. Im a little concerned that this change puts the price over the top.

ctx_ 6y ago

Everyone seems really hyped with Algolia, before and after the pricing update but the major drawback i've seen is the pricing model that is still a big issue IMO. Given you have 10K documents, if you want to make a "sort by something" you have to create a replica with another ranking configuration. So if you want 4 sort criteria, you'll be billed for 40K document even if you have only 10k at start. I've looked in competitors like Swiftype and even them point out this issue in the pricing page : "Index once, sort all you want (No need to replicate engines to sort or filter your data in different ways. Once your data is indexed, it can be filtered, faceted and sorted at will.)"