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Comment by redox_ | Hacker News Reader

(Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years, but this is one more signal for us to act!

The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.

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This has always been a major deterrent to me wanting to use Algolia. It's basically impossible for me to know whether for x number of users doing y number of searches Algolia will cost $100/month or $1,000/month or $10,000/month. It amazes me that anyone commits to investing development effort in using Algolia (with lock-in, to boot) when you have no idea whether it's something you can even afford.

It's very easy to start with so from time investment it will always be a good choice. I looked at several options for doc search and since I didn't want to invest more than 2 hours I just setup a Drone CI job to scrape and update index every night and added that search bar :) quite happy so far although self hosted solution would be preferable

As with all usage-based product, when you start it is cheap (much cheaper than building on your own), then as you grow your resources will hopefully scale with the number of users.

If your resources don't scale with usage, yes, you have a problem, but I'd say not limited to algolia

What's different is that with other products, i.e., those that have clear and understandable pricing, you can forecast the future costs and make a decision about whether it's an affordable solution for the particular product/business you're building. With Algolia, you can't.

Why would I want to build a product/business that uses Algolia technology as a key component when I have no idea whether the eventual cost of Algolia will be acceptable? I wouldn't, which is why despite Algolia's extremely attractive features, I have time and time again been unable to recommend its use.

Btw, part of this pricing rework is also about removing some of the feature gating. It's an approach we've taken to really get the feature right, first releasing it to a smaller set of (larger) customers before opening it up to the whole mass.

So give people some sliders with all of those things, and let them drag it around.

What is my cost with a million objects, an average computational complexity of 3 compute units per search, etc.

If you can't do that, at least give some example scenarios (small, medium, big, huge, etc) with total pricing.

Just... something. Anything would be better than a "contact us" link.

I absolutely refuse to use or recommend anything that looks like a black box enterprise solution if it lacks transparency.

Hey, while you're on it, look into compatibility issues with older versions of Firefox on your web interface.

It's impossible to use due to bugs.

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