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Comment by kabes | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 the year."

[1] https://www.algolia.com/pricing/

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

The overage fees are also a mystery, the FAQ only says:

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

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

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.

For a second I thought they had gotten rid of the # of record pricing and made this a hell of a lot simpler. But I guess now it's just all hidden in a FAQ at the bottom of the page, and it's actually worse than it used to be.

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