The final "S" in SaaS is important. Sometimes the difference between two products can be that Service. In Algolia's case, they screwed up. They made a mistake that caused them to lose all of our documents in one of our indexes. Within a few minutes of contacting them, they had figured out what happened, and were working to correct it. Unfortunately they couldn't restore our lost documents, and they felt very bad for this happening.
Despite not having an official SLA with them, they knew that we were a customer, and one they wanted to treat right. They didn't point to a document and say "well the service was only down for 1% of the time, so we're only going to give you back 5% of your bill". They are a small company, with a great product, and a fast-paced innovative team. They didn't hide behind an SLA, they specifically went above and beyond to make sure we were happy.
The Contract doesn't matter
Despite not having an official SLA with them, they knew that we were a customer, and one they wanted to treat right. They didn't point to a document and say "well the service was only down for 1% of the time, so we're only going to give you back 5% of your bill". They are a small company, with a great product, and a fast-paced innovative team. They didn't hide behind an SLA, they specifically went above and beyond to make sure we were happy.
Algolia owned up to the mistake.
We all make mistakes, and they owned up to it, and reimbursed our entire bill for the month. They admitted it was their fault, and they were willing to do anything and everything to apologize and minimize the impact on us.Algolia understands customer relations
Algolia Cares, unlike Splunk. They responded quickly, found the problem, and gave me steps to correct it, as well as their assurances that they have implemented test cases to prevent it from happening again. It wasn't catastrophic, our systems didn't go down because of it, but it did inconvenience us, and they were well aware of it.Happy customers are repeat customers
I'm incredibly happy to see Algolia spend so much time making sure we feel satisfied with the service. They're constantly improving things and taking our feedback, and giving us features that we said we'd like to see. They're keeping us in the loop, and when something bad happens they fix it.
If you need a distributed search system, I strongly suggest Algolia. It's fast, the service is great, and the system is incredibly reliable. We've had only a few issues over the past few months we've been using it, and none of it was true downtime. They looked at our specific use case and have made improvements to their backend systems to make sure our system runs fast, not told us to re-do how we use the system to make it run fast.
They take the initiative to make the system work the way we want it to. They don't force you to use something they've structured for a specific purpose.
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