May 17, 2022
We originally had used Algolia for our search features. It's a great service, however the cost was getting to be unmanageable for us. Algolia's pricing model is based around the number of search requests and the number of records. So if you produce a large number of small records the price can quickly get out of hand even if your actual dataset doesn't take up that much space on disk. Spikes in internet traffic can also lead to unexpected increases in billing (even if the traffic comes from bots)
After migrating to Typesense Cloud we have been able to save A LOT of money without losing out on any of the performance we got from Algolia. I do not exaggerate when I say that our overhead for search is less than 25% of what it used to be. Typesense also has the following advantages:
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Their cloud offering lets you configure your Typesense nodes and specify how many you want to spin up. This allows you to manage costs in a manner that is way more predictable. (You basically pay for servers/nodes instead of records and requests)
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It's completely open source. We can spin up a cluster on our own servers or run it locally.
