Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.algolia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 100 posts

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

#31

Post by karterk »

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…

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

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

#32

Post by iambateman »

scribu wrote: post #8
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.

Where you using a different search solution previously? What was it?

We were using Google Custom Search. So Algolia is a big upgrade.

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

#33

Post by jabo »

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?

There are also free & open source options like Typesense: https://github.com/typesense/typesense

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

#34

Post by karterk »

grouseway wrote: post #28

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.

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

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

#35

Post by jabo »

alooPotato wrote: post #27
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.

Out of curiosity, could you expand on how it doesn't make sense for SaaS use cases?

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

#37

Post by kevindong »

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…

> What are the overages??! Why is it not just sliding back to pay-as-you-go pricing, like reservations for say EC2 work.

I'd guess because they'd like to accurately model their compute requirements to try to get as low of a price as possible (e.g. via reserved EC2 instances).

If clients constantly and consistently shoot past what Algolia plans for, it might cause issues or at the very least cause the company to spend more on, on-demand instances than they intended to.

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

#38

Post by ysavir »

jabo wrote: post #35
alooPotato wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, could you expand on how it doesn't make sense for SaaS use cases?

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!

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

#39

Post by momokavar »

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.

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

#40

Post by AOsborn »

This is a huge increase in pricing for all our customers using Algolia.

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.

Post reply on HN