Algolia Search

Algolia gets you to "search bar that feels instant" in a day. The risks: misconfigured indices that bill 10x what you expected, leaked search keys, and ranking that returns garbage because you never read the relevance docs.

When to use

• SaaS product needing in-app search (docs, CRM, product catalog).
• E-commerce with faceting (filter by brand, price range, category).
• Search-as-you-type UX over O(thousands–millions) of records.
• Replacing Elasticsearch when you don't want to operate ES.

When NOT to use

• Hyperscale (>100M records) where Algolia's pricing doesn't make sense — Typesense / Meilisearch self-hosted, or OpenSearch.
• Full-text indexing of >10MB documents per record — Algolia's per-record limit will fight you.
• You need vector / semantic search as the primary mode — pgvector / Pinecone / Weaviate.

Index design