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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

#81

Post by jlemoine »

sidi wrote: post #76
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…

It is also less expensive and more accessible for mid/large volumes. We have built-in volume discount in the pricing that reduce significantly the price at scale

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

#82

Post by jlemoine »

BrigadierG wrote: post #78
jlemoine wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 wou…

I understand your perception, pricing and perception is hard. I want to reassure you that this is really way cheaper for people to start using the product and as a company it was a huge project to lunch this pricing, especially when you lower the price for such a large portion of users.

The previous pricing was based on indexing operations + search operations. The new pricing is only based on search request and in a lot of situation N search operations = 1 search request (disjunctive faceting, federated search, etc.). At the end, for the big majority of free users (> 99%) they have as many or more search request in the 10 free units than in the old plan.

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

#83

Post by andriosr »

jlemoine wrote: post #61
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?

I am the co-founder of Algolia, we have a dedicated pricing for the SaaS use cases that we call OEM pricing (in a few words pay per GB of usage). When we have a platform, it is very hard to have a pricing that works perfectly well for all industries and that is simple!

Agreed! I really appreciate Algolia trying to make it simple and transparent.

It’s a way better experience than having to talk to a sales rep to get a sense of pricing after 3 calls.

We face the same challenge with Decimlas.app, and will be adding pricing to the landing page in the next few weeks.

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

#84

Post by vvoyer »

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

Hi there, I see you posted multiple times your Typesense link. Just wanted to point out that your demo website is broken for some days now. I keep getting "ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID".

Good luck!

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

#85

Post by andriosr »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #74
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 prefer 1000x a complex pricing page than having to talk to a sales rep to get the first sense of pricing.

Each industry has different aspects of how much value they get from a product, the effort to try to encapsulate these aspects into a single pricing functions is much appreciated.

We face the same challenge with Decimals.app - should be adding pricing soon as well

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

#86

Post by dubcanada »

jlemoine wrote: post #59
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)

I fail to see where you provided him wrong, based on my math and the calculator in the backend. The existing $29 is roughly equal to $240 on the new plan 250,000 operations vs 250,000 searches. Obviously operations include adding/updating/deleting data. But if you don't do any of that it's basically a different of $220. If you do some operations, say half of them are operations you are looking at $150~ vs $29.

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

#87

Post by smnrchrds »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #71
smnrchrds wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That still leaves out a lot: unincorporated lands, First Nation reserves, small settlement where all the mail goes to a post office instead of individual buildings, etc.

Also, one of the main benefits from Canada Post API is that it gives you the canonical address Canada Post uses to deliver packages. I don't think this always overlaps with addresses municipalities use to assess taxes. For example, I can imagine for an apartment building belonging to a real estate management company, there would be a single entry in the municipality database (because there is only one owner who needs to pay taxes), but one entry per unit in Canada Post database.

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

#88

Post by arichard123 »

dawnerd wrote: post #41
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.

Well, if so they've failed in my case. I've got a customer doing £1m annual turnover on e-commerce, and we were about to start an integration with Algolia. The new pricing has stopped that from going ahead. I've been asked to find an alternative.

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

#89

Post by karterk »

vvoyer wrote: post #84
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

Hi there, I see you posted multiple times your Typesense link. Just wanted to point out that your demo website is broken for some days now. I keep getting "ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID". Good luck!

Thanks it's back up now.

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

#90

Post by mkcg »

arichard123 wrote: post #88
dawnerd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, if so they've failed in my case. I've got a customer doing £1m annual turnover on e-commerce, and we were about to start an integration with Algolia. The new pricing has stopped that from going ahead. I've been asked to find an alternative.

What is your stack ?

I made a simple Proof-of-concept of a PHP backend based on Redisearch compatible with the Instantsearch.js library.

You can take a look at it here : https://github.com/MKCG/algolia-on-redisearch/tree/master/ap...

With the Covid crisis we were no longer able to pay 3K per month for a basic search engine and now we are using a solution based on this on production (> 30M search/month).

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