How does Algolia count records?

The number of records equals to the total record count across all your indices, including replicas.

If you exceed the record limit for your paid plan, we charge an over-quota based on the maximum number of records you reach. Your plan may let you pre-purchase discounted, additional records at the beginning of your contract period. If you exceed the record limit for the free plan, you will be blocked until the new billing cycle begins.

To offer flexibility, we ignore the three days when you had the most records. This means we don’t count them in your monthly total record.

For Standard replicas, let’s say you have 5,000 records in main index, and three Standard Replicas for that index. This means you would have a total record count of 5,000 x 4 ( primary index + 3 replicas) = 20,000 records. Your plan may limit the number of records that you can store. As long as you don’t exceed the maximum record count of your plan, you can add, update, or delete as many records as you want.

How does Algolia count operations?

For our latest Build and Grow plans, search requests and records are charged separately, per our pricing page. We don't charge for operations, however, a protective limit of 10,000 indexing operations for every 1000 search requests and records used per month. For more information on indexing operations and limitations, you can follow this article.

For legacy Free, Standard, and Premium PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) plans, we deduct any search requests perform and records that you store from the usage units included in your plan. A unit is 1,000 search request or 1,000 records. If your usage exceeds the number of units within your plan, we charge you for the additional units at the end of the billing period. We don't charge for operations, however, there is a contractual limit of 10,000 indexing operations for every 1000 search requests and records used per month. For more information on indexing operations and limitations, you can follow this article.

You can opt to commit to a fixed number of units for the year at a discounted rate. For more details, please visit our pricing page.

For older plans, Record, Rule, Synonym, ACL, and Indexing operations are counted against your plan's monthly quota. If the plan's quota is exceeded, you are charged for overages. For more information on indexing operations and limitations, you can follow this article.

Counting search requests

For plans released after July 2020

Every time you make a search request to an Algolia index, or a search request for a multi-index search with multipleQueries, we count one search request. In autocomplete and search-as-you-type implementations, a search happens at every keystroke.

For example, if a user types the word “apple” (five letters) in your search input, it sends a request to Algolia for every character while your user is typing, resulting in five search operations. When searching for “apple” (five letters) in a multi-index search-as-you-type implementation targeting three indices (without using multipleQueries), each keystroke counts as three operations, resulting in 15 search operations total. If you use multipleQueries to perform a search operation, you only make one request to our server, and we only count five search request (one per keystroke). Calls to the search and searchForFacetValues methods count as one search operation.

For older plans

Legacy plans calculate search operations in the same way, except that a multi-index search with multipleQueries counts a search operation for every query in index. A search with multipleQueries that targets 3 indices, counts as 3 search operations.

Unused operations

Unused usage units and operations, either included in your plan or purchased additionally, do not roll over to the next service period.

Additional Resources:

For Indexing Operations: How does Algolia count indexing operations?

For Reindexing Operations: How does Algolia count reindexing operations?

For Sandbox Applications: How does Algolia count operations for sandbox applications?

For Recommend Requests: How is a recommend request calculated against my usage?

For InstantSearch Operations: How does Algolia count InstantSearch operations?

For Refinement Operations: How does Algolia count refinement operations?

For Replica Indices: How does Algolia count operations on replica indices?

For Maximum Queries Per Second: How does Algolia calculate the Maximum QPS (Queries Per Second)?