[josephg]

I set up algolia for a client while doing some work for them. We needed to add search to a website we were building which searched over data in the client's CMS.

I could have set up elasticsearch. But algolia was cheap and easy to configure, and we could just click around the algolia UI to tweak things like "number of allowed spelling mistakes". We didn't need to proxy anything or set up routes - we just pulled in the algolia JS library to run queries from the application. It was easier for the client to maintain in an ongoing way rather than maintaining their own elasticsearch instance on EC2 or something like that.

I'm sure there are plenty of times you'd want to run your own elasticsearch instance, and I think that would also have been a reasonable choice for us. But I still feel pretty happy with the choice to use algolia.

Arguments to set up your own elasticsearch instance remind me of the criticism against dropbox - "just run your own server with rsync! Its so easy!". Paying someone a small amount of money to do that for me is often a great deal.