I would not ;)
> less eng-focused companies that would pay
Actually, our experience has been the opposite. The more sophisticated the engineering team, the more they recognize how big of a pain unified search ranking is to build and maintain, and the more they appreciate what we offer.
On the forever "model-bakeoff": our approach is to include all existing models as features into an omni-model. If you are experienced in ML ops, you should be cringing, but we pull it off because from a customer development standpoint, we never want to be competing with some other new technique. Instead, we want to have a big ball of systems and progress is always "add more stuff." Then, the business and product teams can focus on how they want their product to work versus technical details of specific recommendation systems.