Algolia offers a cost management feature, where you can set a budget trigger and if your invoice exceeds the limit, you are notified. This helps create transparency and allows you to have more control over your account, usage, and invoices. You can find this feature and set budgets by going to the Billing > Cost Management tab on your Algolia Dashboard.
If your budget trigger has exceeded the limit that you have set and you would like to investigate, here are some common causes and solutions:
- When there is a spike in your operations, you’ll want to look for any bugs in your solution. It could be a runaway loop triggering thousands of search requests or you may be sending too many empty requests, triggered by automatic refreshes.
- Another explanation for a spike could be bots. Here is the documentation we created to investigate and monitor your unexplained search operations. In addition, you can generate a new Search API Key with reduced queries: Rate Limiting an API Key. The rate limit is up to you. We generally recommend starting with a higher number (in order to avoid limiting real users) and reduce it gradually based on the usage/fake bots.
- To know more about who’s doing searches on your website, you can go to the “Indices > Logs” section of your Algolia dashboard. You will be able to dig into every search request and get the associated IP or see if there’s one IP that is always running the same request.
Here is an helpful article on how Algolia counts records and operations.