from Hacker News

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

by jlemoine on 7/2/20, 5:44 AM with 98 comments

  • by jhgg on 7/2/20, 11:18 PM

    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 different colored dots depending on the plan, making me think there were 3 different kinds of units.

    A slider would be nice, let me slide it to what my search volume for a given month would be, and tell me how much that would cost, factoring in volume discounts.

    Additionally, this is a huge red flag:

    > If you exceed your committed usage, there are overages that will be charged.

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

    ----

    As an aside, we use Algolia to power some search features at Discord. This new pricing structure looks to be an order of magnitude more expensive (we fall under the "contact sales" usage here...) Luckily we're grandfathered in or we'd have to consider putting a cloudflare worker in-front of this and leveraging that to do caching of common hot queries to reduce cost.

  • by jschumacher on 7/3/20, 2:32 AM

    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.

  • by AOsborn on 7/3/20, 2:13 AM

    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.

  • by atonse on 7/2/20, 9:08 PM

    We've loved algolia for the 2-3 sites we've used it for. The speed is unbeatable.

    I wish we could've used it for one of our HIPAA use cases (patient data). I could've rolled out powerful search for an internal site in a day, but instead I'm having to build in postgres full text search and looking longingly at them.

  • by kabes on 7/2/20, 10:11 PM

    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?

  • by iambateman on 7/2/20, 8:43 PM

    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.

  • by AznHisoka on 7/3/20, 12:26 AM

    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).

  • by grouseway on 7/3/20, 12:25 AM

    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.

  • by disqard on 7/2/20, 10:00 PM

    As somebody with a small side-project that would benefit from search, this sounds like a pretty good deal! Will have to give this a spin and see.

  • by hitekker on 7/3/20, 1:46 AM

    Ah, “Value-based” pricing, or, how much a company can gouge their customers before their customers change vendors.

  • by ctx_ on 7/10/20, 8:45 AM

    Everyone seems really hyped with Algolia, before and after the pricing update but the major drawback i've seen is the pricing model that is still a big issue IMO.

    Given you have 10K documents, if you want to make a "sort by something" you have to create a replica with another ranking configuration.

    So if you want 4 sort criteria, you'll be billed for 40K document even if you have only 10k at start.

    I've looked in competitors like Swiftype and even them point out this issue in the pricing page :

    "Index once, sort all you want (No need to replicate engines to sort or filter your data in different ways. Once your data is indexed, it can be filtered, faceted and sorted at will.)"

  • by JustARandomGuy on 7/2/20, 8:54 PM

    Love the change. I really like the "annual commitments" pricing - I love it when I can pre-reserve a certain amount of performance and get a discount for it.

  • by hartator on 7/3/20, 3:17 AM

    Unit pricing seems complicated and arbitrary.

  • by lbj on 7/3/20, 7:38 AM

    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.

  • by sonic182 on 7/3/20, 7:26 AM

    People, just use Doofinder -> https://www.doofinder.com/

  • by kumarski on 7/3/20, 4:25 AM

    While I love algolia, I hate the way it is implemented on producthunt.

  • by cc_stoic on 7/3/20, 3:08 AM

    this is serverless search. I love it

  • by wolco on 7/2/20, 10:12 PM

    A dollar for 1,000 queries. A million queries costs $10000 dollars?

    For that money there are so many better options.

  • by julienreszka on 7/2/20, 11:31 AM

    This is awesome. Now that it exists seems like inevitable.

  • by momokavar on 7/3/20, 2:01 AM

    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.