Algolia

Algolia is an AI search and retrieval platform covering search, recommendations, personalisation, browse experiences and analytics, with Agent Studio for building and deploying AI agents on the same index.

Personalisation built on top of the search index is a more coherent architecture than it may appear. Personalisation needs to know what a user has looked at, searched for and clicked, and the search engine already observes every one of those events as a matter of course. Bolting a separate personalisation product onto a third-party search engine means rebuilding that behavioural stream somewhere else and keeping the two in agreement.

Usage-based pricing is the commercially distinctive part and it suits the workload properly. Search volume tracks visitor traffic rather than employee headcount, so a seat licence would price a busy consumer site the same as a quiet internal one. The Grow plan starts free with 10,000 search requests a month included, then 0.50 dollars per additional thousand requests and 0.40 dollars per additional 100,000 records. The Premium tier adds AI capabilities on top of keyword search at 1.75 dollars per additional thousand requests.

That difference between the two rates is the whole AI pricing question in miniature and is worth modelling before committing: AI-driven retrieval costs three and a half times what keyword search does per request, so the decision is not whether it is better but whether it is better by enough at your query volume. Agent Studio is the newer addition for creating, testing and deploying agents against the same data.