What do you like best about the product?

It is a search tool and we haven't experienced any downtime, though hard to say if it's that much better than its competitors. We were attracted by its Startup Program, but that hasn't delivered for us.

What do you dislike about the product?

Algolia markets its startup program as $10,000 in Free Search & Discovery Usage, which is super attractive for pre-revenue startups and puts it ahead of its competitors. HOWEVER, what they don't tell you up front is that as soon as you're accepted into the startup program, even if it's months before you launch, the clock starts on that offer, so in practice, you really won't get $10K in value. What the startup program looked like in practice for us--we set up algolia summer 2024 as we were building our product. We launched Jan 2025, 6 months into Algolia's startup program. We've only used ~$300 in credits, yet we will lose the rest of the supposed $10K in credits next month because they only give you 1 year to use the $10K, regardless of when you actually go live. As a small, pre-revenue startup, we're now locked in to paying Algolia's expensive rates until we have the engineering bandwidth to switch, which we definitely will be switching, but I wish we had known up front because we would not have gone with Algolia and invested the time to set it up in the first place. We tried contacting Algolia to explain our situation, and they said they couldn't do anything, so I'm writing this review so more startups can be aware and not make the same mistake we did!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Searching a large database quickly and accurately.