Carespot cut search spend by 90% after leaving Algolia

At a glance

The challenge

Carespot ran on Algolia. The search itself worked, but the bill was about €1,000 a month and it moved with traffic. Planning a budget meant predicting how many searches customers would run, which no shop can predict. The dashboards were complicated enough that the team stopped opening them, and every change to relevance or synonyms had to go through a developer, so small merchandising jobs turned into engineering tickets.

The results

• ✅Search costs fell by about 90%, from roughly €1,000 a month to under €100
• ✅A flat price means a busy month costs the same as a quiet one
• ✅The team added a large set of synonyms themselves, using the words their own customers type
• ✅Analytics simple enough that they actually get read
• ✅No engineering hours spent on search. Merchandising is handled in the dashboard