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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

#41

Post by dawnerd »

AOsborn wrote: post #40

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…

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.

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

#42

Post by jschumacher »

Interesting change. Disclaimer, I joined one of Algolia's competitors (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.

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

#43

Post by smnrchrds »

ysavir wrote: post #38
jabo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sear…

Interesting. This reminds me of Canada Post's address complete API. You can integrate it with your website or app to ensure the addresses the users enter are valid within Canada and entered correctly. The pricing is around 5–10¢ per search [0]. At that price point, it only makes sense to use it for e-commerce if you are going to deliver physical goods to the customer and want to minimize the number of returned "address not found" packages. But if the pricing were lower, e.g. close to Google Map's 0.3¢ per search [1], I imagine the list of potential uses would have increased substantially.

[0] https://www.canadapost.ca/pca/pricing/

[1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet

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

#44

Post by momokavar »

momokavar wrote: post #39

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.

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?

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

#46

Post by timdorr »

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.

They say you can keep your current pricing forever:

> Finally, if you’re a current Algolia customer and are happy with your plan, that’s great! You can remain on your existing plan indefinitely.

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

#48

Post by lukevp »

karterk wrote: post #31
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

Does typesense have any ecom features or is it just a full text index?

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

#50

Post by karterk »

lukevp wrote: post #48
karterk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does typesense have any ecom features or is it just a full text index?

Typesense supports a lot of features needed for e-commerce including complex ones like filtering on facet values.
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