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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

#51

Post by chrysoprace »

timdorr wrote: post #46
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.

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.

Minor nitpick; indefinitely does not mean forever, it just means there's no defined end. It could end tomorrow, it could end in 10 years.

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

#52

Post by beering »

gberger wrote: post #19
gildas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

So for 1 million records, you need to spend $1k/month. Hmm.

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?

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

#54

Post by zelly »

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

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.

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

#55

Post by PudgePacket »

beering wrote: post #52
gberger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for 1 million records, you need to spend $1k/month. Hmm.

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?

1 MB * 1,000,000 = 1 TB

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

#56

Post by ponker »

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.

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.

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

#57

Post by snikolaev »

zelly wrote: post #54
mitchbob wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those are?

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.

> For instance Craiglist uses Sphinx

Actually Manticore Search (fork of Sphinx)

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

#58

Post by kabes »

gildas wrote: post #18
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?

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 th…

Thanks for pointing that out. I read an (old) article on the engineering behind it and they keep a lot in memory. So it makes sense to cap this somehow.

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

#59

Post by jlemoine »

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…

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)

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

#60

Post by jlemoine »

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.

No worries, it will not be a 100x on the pricing. We will add a pricing calculator to simplify the projection.

Btw, for your use case we designed a different pricing that we call OEM pricing that is simply based on the GB used and not the numbers of searches/records.

Also you can keep your existing plan, we force no-one to move to the new pricing.

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