Except its right there in the transcript. It used to be a self-service SaaS application, to enterprise sales.
Nearly all features are gated behind an enterprise-sales "contact us" box with no transparency in pricing.
They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product.
As a developer, I need to see transparent pricing up-front.
It's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway.
Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.
(Sylvain from Algolia speaking) Thanks for sharing, our pricing & its transparency is actually something we are working on right now to address this perception. We've been iterating a few times already over the past 7 years, but this is one more signal for us to act!
The reality is that based on the number of objects you want to search in, your search traffic, your searches' complexity and your index/relevance configuration; the underlying resources can vary soo much, it's hard to have a single pricing that fits all use-case.
This has always been a major deterrent to me wanting to use Algolia. It's basically impossible for me to know whether for x number of users doing y number of searches Algolia will cost $100/month or $1,000/month or $10,000/month. It amazes me that anyone commits to investing development effort in using Algolia (with lock-in, to boot) when you have no idea whether it's something you can even afford.
It's very easy to start with so from time investment it will always be a good choice. I looked at several options for doc search and since I didn't want to invest more than 2 hours I just setup a Drone CI job to scrape and update index every night and added that search bar :) quite happy so far although self hosted solution would be preferable
As with all usage-based product, when you start it is cheap (much cheaper than building on your own), then as you grow your resources will hopefully scale with the number of users.
If your resources don't scale with usage, yes, you have a problem, but I'd say not limited to algolia
What's different is that with other products, i.e., those that have clear and understandable pricing, you can forecast the future costs and make a decision about whether it's an affordable solution for the particular product/business you're building. With Algolia, you can't.
Why would I want to build a product/business that uses Algolia technology as a key component when I have no idea whether the eventual cost of Algolia will be acceptable? I wouldn't, which is why despite Algolia's extremely attractive features, I have time and time again been unable to recommend its use.
Btw, part of this pricing rework is also about removing some of the feature gating. It's an approach we've taken to really get the feature right, first releasing it to a smaller set of (larger) customers before opening it up to the whole mass.
Search is fast, relevancy is awesome, it's hosted and I have analytics. So for that use case it's a clear and major win against installing, configuring and adding search analytics to Elastic.
They're not selling to developers, they're selling to business executives, they give a nod to the fact developers are the end-user of this product, but all the material on the site is as executive-oriented as it gets. Listing other brands they've sold the product to, big stats about ROI and increased sales and revenue and "white-papers" which are really just fluff-pieces to hype up the product.
As a developer, I need to see transparent pricing up-front. It's no good telling me about features, APIs without a way to figure out what it'll cost because that cost might easily be orders-of-magnitude out of range. Look at the pricing for Algolia - $499/mo and you don't actually get any of the features that separate it from products like ElasticSearch which are available as open-source downloads or as a much cheaper hosted service. You get tooling to make integrating search easier than the open-source alternatives, but now you're bound to the tooling provided by that service and its capabilities, or writing your own tooling anyway.
Either give me a monthly cost I can use to determine if its worth suggesting a product, or give me usage-based pricing that lets me start out cheaply, and lets my bill grow as the value I gain from your product grows.