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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

#71

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

smnrchrds wrote: post #43
ysavir wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "addre…

Many local governments publish shapefiles (geojson) that have address information. You could parse out addresses and have a fairly simple free option. Since this data is based on property taxes, these data sets aren't going to be missing parcels (or the tax collector would be missing potential revenue).

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

#73

Post by lbj »

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.

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

#74

Post by rawoke083600 »

jschumacher wrote: post #42

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,…

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.

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

#75

Post by rvnx »

Znafon wrote: post #17
ykevinator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why algolia exists and why people pay for it

They have a useful list of feature that you can look at: 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.

Isn't it exactly what a managed Elasticsearch does ?

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

#76

Post by sidi »

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…

This pricing change from Algolia makes it easier for low-volume search users or someone who is just getting started to use their enterprise features, but at the same time as the parent mentions, makes it an order of magnitude more expensive for mid-to-high volume users. Imo, this is a mismatch as there is already a trial in place for someone who's just getting started to try those features out.

For anyone interested in creating a search at scale, I would recommend checking us out at appbase.io (founder here :wave:) - we provide relevant search, analytics, and access control for search and are built transparently on top of Elasticsearch. It also doesn't hurt that we author some of the most popular open-source search UI libraries: https://github.com/appbaseio/reactivesearch

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

#77

Post by mrweasel »

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 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.

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

#78

Post by BrigadierG »

jlemoine wrote: post #65
AznHisoka wrote: post #29

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).

(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.

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?

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

#79

Post by BrigadierG »

rvnx wrote: post #75
Znafon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a useful list of feature that you can look at: 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.

Isn't it exactly what a managed Elasticsearch does ?

Yes but vastly faster, and requires less setup.

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

#80

Post by Can_Not »

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.

I don't know what the original prices are, but as someone who might like to use algoria search instead of MVP search, the idea that pricing scales with our usage (e.g. free tier -> lowest paid tier) is very appealing. There's too many SaaS where when your usage jumps plus 1kb suddenly they want $100/month instead of $0. Which is hard if you have a tight budget or wnat to keep a tight reign on your budget.
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