It is also less expensive and more accessible for mid/large volumes. We have built-in volume discount in the pricing that reduce significantly the price at scale

(I am the CTO and co-founder). It seems like most people missed that we introduced volume discount in the model.

On this example: - 1M queries per month $847 in full pay-as-you-go - 1M queries per month with yearly commitment cost $7200 per year ($600 per month)

1. You say the discounted cost for 1M queries per month with yearly commitment is $600 (= 1000 units, priced incrementally). But according to your website (https://www.algolia.com/pricing/) 1000 units cost: 10 units free + (90 units x $0.83) + (400 units x $0.70) + (500 units x $0.61) = 659.70 ! This would be $659.70 versus the $600 you stated. Am I understanding something wrong?

2. What would be the discounted cost for 10M and 100M queries per month with yearly commitment?

1. Yes you miss the yearly discount. 1000 units = 12000 units per year = 7295/year

2. 10M/month with yearly commitment = $46895/year 100M/month with yearly commitment = $165895/year

Thank you for the explanation!

(I am the CTO and co-founder) This is not exactly true, the previous free plan was 10k records and 100k API calls (counting all indexing operations and all search API call).

We now only count search request and we did a simulation on our existing free plan base, offering 10 units cover all of them.

Btw, we keep offering more quota for opensource projects.

(I am the CTO and Co-founder). I can reassure you this is not the case, I don't have visibility on when we will do an IPO and we grandfather all existing customers. We always did that and we still have customers today on 2013 pricing! It bring a lot of complexity internally.

We released this new pricing only because we are convinced this is better for customers.

I signed up for an account just to respond to this. I run a small, low-budget, lean startup and we were banking on the starter plan lasting us at least 6 months as we gradually scaled. You cited in the blog post that making this change was supposed to "reduce entry costs" but how has this happened?

Just the limit of the old free plan would cost you more than the old starter plan! The limit of the old starter plan would cost like 7x as much now. Can you give a single use case under which the new pricing is cheaper for entry level customers?

I understand your perception, pricing and perception is hard. I want to reassure you that this is really way cheaper for people to start using the product and as a company it was a huge project to lunch this pricing, especially when you lower the price for such a large portion of users.

The previous pricing was based on indexing operations + search operations. The new pricing is only based on search request and in a lot of situation N search operations = 1 search request (disjunctive faceting, federated search, etc.). At the end, for the big majority of free users (> 99%) they have as many or more search request in the 10 free units than in the old plan.

Yes indeed, it is recent (since 2020)

(I am the CTO and Co-founder), we are HIPAA compliant since 2020 and we can support your use case

Good to know. We’ll be in touch!

(I am the co-founder and CTO of Algolia).

Thanks for your feedback, we have some more work to make our pricing page clear. We need to add a simulator on this page.

The reason of this indirection is that we still have to deal with data/record. It is unfortunately not possible to pay only for searches, you can imagine a use case that push 100GB of data and perform only a few searches. The unit gives access to 1k searches request and 1k records. For the majority of users, they will pay per searches.

For SaaS use case, we have a different pricing where we price per GB with volume discount.

There is a volume discount, so the more units you consume, the cheaper they are. And if you commit to a year, the volume discount applies on your your yearly capacity. This give you a significant discount if you commit to a year. This is how you can have overages. Of course if you stay on a month-to-month play, there is no overages.

I am the co-founder of Algolia, we have a dedicated pricing for the SaaS use cases that we call OEM pricing (in a few words pay per GB of usage).

When we have a platform, it is very hard to have a pricing that works perfectly well for all industries and that is simple!

Agreed! I really appreciate Algolia trying to make it simple and transparent.

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.

No worries, it will not be a 100x on the pricing. We will add a pricing calculator to simplify the projection.

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.

This is not the case, the price of unit decrease with volume and you can have a big discount if you want to commit to a yearly (similar to AWS/GCP/Azure)

I fail to see where you provided him wrong, based on my math and the calculator in the backend. The existing $29 is roughly equal to $240 on the new plan 250,000 operations vs 250,000 searches. Obviously operations include adding/updating/deleting data. But if you don't do any of that it's basically a different of $220. If you do some operations, say half of them are operations you are looking at $150~ vs $29.