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.
Btw, for your use case we designed a different pricing that we call OEM pricing that is simply based on the GB used and not the numbers of searches/records.
Also you can keep your existing plan, we force no-one to move to the new pricing.
> Finally, if you’re a current Algolia customer and are happy with your plan, that’s great! You can remain on your existing plan indefinitely.
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 search being used. The more a client uses search, the less I'm profiting from having them as a client. They could potentially even cost me money to service them!
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.
A poor man's approach could be to query the publicly available data sets, and use that data when there's match. Then, only pay for queries that fall into the edge cases.
But search relevancy is only one part of the equation. Think about a physical store and how the milk is usually in the back and a few high margin items are close to the counter or strategically placed. The same can be true for an ecommerce store. If the search engine has the ability to take business metrics like revenue and margins, or customer data like loyalty programs or brand affinity into account, you can much better optimise for your desired business outcome.
We just recently switched one of the largest ecommerce retailers in Australia over from Algolia to Sajari by doing the above and increasing their conversion rate by 10%.
When we have a platform, it is very hard to have a pricing that works perfectly well for all industries and that is simple!
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.