Has anyone used Algolia with Umbraco? There is a package that makes it look easy but wondering if anyone has used it and how well it worked.
I’m also wondering how bad pricing ended up being - since it’s based on number of searches, it’s somewhat hard to estimate. I see other forums saying how it’s tens of thousands of dollars a month, but for a smallish site, to me it looks like it should be close to free.
Has anyone done a site with this?
We used it for a site made for a chain of auto workshops.
We used the package to sync Umbraco content to Algolia, and then used the Algolia APIs to create a second index with workshop data. We ended up doing our own search implementation as we needed some additional features.
For pricing it varies - our client opted not to have any typeahead/suggestion which cuts down a lot on amount of searches. Most months they pay neglible amounts (less than €10).
It is also quite well documented and nice to work with, I would recommend it!
I haven’t used Algolia with Umbraco, so I can’t comment directly on the Umbraco integration. I have used Algolia on a few sites using a different platform though.
What I would say, is that the cost can be quite significant. If they have a large number of page views, or you use the InstantSearch UI library (they don’t try to save on API calls 
) then costs can escalate quickly.
Instead of using the InstantSearch UI library, we often custom built the UI, which means we can cache server side API calls to Algolia, cutting down the overall usage.