Algolia (YC W14) debuts free plan, opens West Coast data center

venturebeat.com

20 points·jlemoine··7 comments

> although it is limited to 1,000 records and 50,000 API calls per month

um, free is nice, but who needs a search engine for 1000 records? You can keep that in a spreadsheet, or sqlite. I think they could bump it up to 10,000 records without cannibalizing any real monetizable businesses.

And even at 10,000 records, you're probably better off pre-loading them as json on the client and avoiding the server request altogether.

Not really sure that's feasible because Algolia records are more akin to Word docs than Excel rows. 10K docs could be approx 10GB of data--definitely not feasible to push over the wire, and pushing the upper bounds of what even sqlite can handle.

A lot of people think that search is only useful on big data set, but that's actually wrong. With Algolia, you are able to find relevant content with few letters, we tolerate typos, we tolerate wrong concatenation, any languages, ... a lot of feature that come out of the box.

You can have an idea of a website with few data that use us here: http://skyscrapercenter.com/

You should give us a try :)

Great! I am using Algolia and it has been phenomenal. As a total newbie to putting data into searchable format it was amazingly trivial. With their examples and just 3 hours of work I had a Django app pushing model updates into indexes and built a live-search capability into some pages.

My only complaint was the plan sizes, jumping from 14-day trial to $50/month when I have tiny amounts of data and querying for the next few months. A free plan will be great.

Fantastic news, can't wait to play with it.

This free plan is available from our pricing page: https://www.algolia.com/pricing#Hacker

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