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

blog.algolia.com

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

#21

Post by SigmundA »

atonse wrote: post #6

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.

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

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

#22

Post by theturtletalks »

mitchbob wrote: post #15
wolco wrote: post #14

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

And those are?

Elastic Search Meili Sonic

Depending on your use case, a front-end search library would work too:

Elasticlunr JS-search Flexsearch Fuse

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

#23

Post by clamprecht »

mitchbob wrote: post #15
wolco wrote: post #14

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

And those are?

Searchify.com (I'm the founder), you pay per number of documents only. Not number of queries.

http://www.searchify.com/plans/

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

#24

Post by jhgg »

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.

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

#25

Post by JoshGlazebrook »

kabes wrote: post #13

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?

For a second I thought they had gotten rid of the # of record pricing and made this a hell of a lot simpler. But I guess now it's just all hidden in a FAQ at the bottom of the page, and it's actually worse than it used to be.

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

#26

Post by JoshGlazebrook »

searchableguy wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hosted version for businesses who are running in a regulated environment?

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 atm. It works pretty well without taking huge resources. Sonic is interesting too if you want something minimal - https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

meilli looks very promising! Thanks for this.

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

#27

Post by alooPotato »

jhgg wrote: post #24

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 d…

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.

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

#28

Post by grouseway »

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.

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

#30

Post by abri »

dvdhnt wrote: post #9
iambateman wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.
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