We've been using Algolia in production for 8 months and moved to self-hosted elasticsearch.
Small dataset, 2,5million records in 10 indexes IIRC, data structures and filtering were quite complex.
Algolia Pros:
* very nice UI/dashboard, stats, lots of options, flexible
* documentation is nice, 'onboarding' was not an issue
* it worked reliably most of the time
Cons:
* lock-in/proprietary. Think twice if you want to base your business on it.
* you have trust them with very sensitive customers data
* it is expensive. We reduced costs from $800/month to 40$/month by moving to self-hosted open source solution
with same level/quality of customer experience.
* guys at Algolia like to rewrite client libraries and make them completely backwards incompatible.
Good luck rewriting almost everything.
* support is incompetent and honestly it was useless in our case. I don't want to share details here in public as lots of people were involved
in the case, but their support is disaster and for us that was major reason to migrate away.
We had major issues for 2 weeks and in the end had to debug&fix problem in their client library by our developer.
Long story, but that one was disaster.
In short, it wasn't extremely horrible experience overall, product is nice in general, but elasticsearch is very very good and Algolia just couldn't justify price tag, sorry.
I am sad to see you had a bad experience with Algolia and I can assure you that we put a lot of effort on backward compatibility:
* we have never discontinued a feature in the API since the launch
* We never broke our API clients, we proposed a new version when a new feature required a big change but we kept the previous version (and this happened only on two API client in 5 years)
For the support, this is our engineer's team working on the product that does the support and we put a lot of effort to make sure all our customers are satisfied and get the relevant answers.
Then if you got the same customer experience with a $40 machine, you have probably not used all the feature/power of the engine. I am sad to see such a feedback and you can make me accountable to make sure we will do everything we can to satisfy all our users
In any case, I would be happy to get your detailed feedback by email (julien at algolia.com). I see it as a good opportunity for us to improve ourselves
(We're currently using MySQL's full-text search and are finding it to be a long way short of the experience we'd like our customers to have.)