[garry]

I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high.

For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster.

Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service.

The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?