Smarter pricing for smarter commerce that’s modular, scalable, and designed to deliver real business outcomes.
Pricing is a major component of any purchasing decision, with return on investment at top of mind. Whether you’re just starting a digital transformation project or looking for a modern solution to take your business to the next level, Coveo transforms product discovery at every customer touchpoint.
We love hearing how Coveo helps our customers not only achieve but exceed their business goals, and we’re able to measure the tangible value that Coveo brings. Our approach to pricing keeps this in mind, giving you everything you need to transform your digital experience and grow revenue, with value packed add-ons that deliver ROI.
With so many decisions to make in the buying process, pricing shouldn’t add complication. We’ve recently updated our pricing to make it even easier to understand, with a feature-rich base package and modular add-ons that grow with your business. Backed by enterprise-grade security and our best-in-class Customer Success team, Coveo’s value scales for any size business and use case.
How Coveo’s Pricing Maps to Delivered Value
More and more, we hear buyers asking for pricing models tied to what they actually use. However, picking the right metric to define usage is critical. While there are several metrics available, a good metric should clearly map to a solution’s delivered value. Here’s where most vendors in our space seem to get it wrong: many tie consumption to search operations triggered at every keystroke or to web traffic, which doesn’t always align with business metrics.
It made much more sense for us to focus on a metric closely tied to the number of search activities their customers perform – rather than the website’s traffic itself. After all, we’re in the business of helping companies increase conversion rates and average order value by helping them deliver the most relevant search experiences to their customers.
Queries Per Month Methodology
Coveo’s base pricing is based on “queries per month” (QPMs). Like the term suggests, the core concept is executing a search query. To define what a single “query” is, we developed a characterization that is flexible enough to accommodate complex commerce customer journeys as well as the multiplicity of search and product discovery touchpoints that Coveo powers.
For us, a query is any request sent to the search API and includes specific, user-driven operations that interact with the index including submitting a search request, applying filters or using search facets, requesting more results pages, and sorting search results. For a detailed description of what counts and doesn’t count as a query, refer to our technical documentation.
Don’t Pay for Type-Aheads
We’ve all experienced type-ahead (autocomplete, query suggest, or autosuggest) search. With each keystroke, the system searches for – and filters – results. This might shock you, but some vendors are actually charging by the keystroke, as it is passing a request back to their server.
With Coveo, the list is actually generated by machine learning and these types of searches don’t hit the index. Thus, the rendering of query suggestions while typing will not count as queries. It’s only when a person selects from a rendered query that it will count.
For example, let’s say a person is searching for some noise-canceling headphones. As that individual is typing, a number of relevant suggestions are shown. In the image below you can see the drop-down of suggestions after the letters n-o-i-s-e (space) c-a have been typed.
With some vendors that string would actually count as 8 queries. Instead, with Coveo, only clicking on a rendered query suggestion (e.g., “noise-canceling headphones”) would count as a query.
The one exception to this understanding of a query is when an updated preview of assets (such as product images) is required for each discrete keystroke. In this case, a Coveo customer can opt to implement this style of search, consuming a query for each character typed. Knowing that this approach might be ideal for some customers, we wanted to ensure we had functionality and flexibility for all use cases.
To properly compare pricing for bundles of queries from different software vendors, it’s critical to ensure you’re not comparing apples with oranges. If you’re currently using a query suggestion model that charges by the keystroke, switching to Coveo could realize a nearly 6x savings. On average, each of Coveo’s queries corresponds to 5.8 individual keystrokes.
This difference isn’t trivial. For example, that would mean that an ecommerce site that requires 100,000 QPMs on Coveo’s model could be charged for 580,000 queries per month based on a different vendor’s pricing model. Remembering that not all queries are created equal can result in exponential savings to the cost of product discovery.
Why Our Definition of Query Is More Business-Tuned
It’s worth highlighting a few more reasons our definition of a query is more aligned with business needs than some competing vendors. First, we’ve heard from our customers that technology buyers appreciate a simplified buying experience, with clarity instead of complexity that adds friction. Most buyers actually have very limited insight into the impacts of query volume after implementation. Ballooning costs after purchase rarely means a happy customer.
Second, what customers really care about is the value your product actually delivers, and pricing models based on an inflated number of search-related actions end up disconnecting value from the product. Simply put, why would they care about the number of keystrokes at all, especially when it’s one search term?
Lastly, we believe that vendors who charge for each keystroke actually penalize the companies trying to catch up with digital leaders in customer experience. You can see this as a tariff on success and innovation.
Today’s digital consumers expect a Google-like experience on every site: type in what you’re looking for, using your own words to describe something that can be described in a million different ways, and like magic, the exact right item appears. Given the experience they’re trained to expect, it’s no surprise that your customers are getting more used to searching using full sentences instead of keywords. At Coveo, instead, we empower digital leaders by handling their customers’ increasingly complex search needs and queries.
Coveo’s Scalable and Flexible Packaging
Coveo’s updated pricing comes with brand new packaging as well. Our approach was to assemble the most valuable functionality into one feature-rich base package, giving customers everything they need to completely transform their commerce experience. Knowing that each customer’s use case is unique and benefits from tailored solutions, we also offer innovative add-ons that drive even more revenue for your business (more on these later).
Building the perfect solution for your business is simple with our updated model. Pricing for the base package is based on units of 100k QPMs, which includes 100k recommendations. With your base package, you also get 100k indexed catalog items, 1 production organization, and 1 sandbox organization. Adding extra entitlements scales easily to as many as your business needs and if you experience sudden increases in volume, you can add more at any time (we’ll always work with you to adjust instead of sending you a surprise bill with no communication).
Our new base package is anything but basic, especially when most vendors choose to charge extra for their advanced AI and personalization features. We’ve included AI Search & Listings with hybrid AI search, multilingual support, query suggestions and corrections, popularity ranking, automatic facet generation and ordering, and our impressive Listing Page Optimizer that automatically sorts products for conversions. Recommendations add extra personalization to the shopping journey with behavior-based, popularity-based, and cart-based product recommendations that drive revenue and engagement. To enhance the experience even further, content recommendations add relevant content alongside products, indexed from any source.
We’ve made it simpler for merchandising teams too, with Coveo’s Merchandising Hub – a visual interface to manage search and listings, and layer business rules on top of an AI foundation. Here, you can tailor AI-driven recommendation strategies to your business needs, curate and manage facets manually, create dynamic AI-driven listing pages, and get detailed reporting, insights, and analytics (with an included Snowflake reader account).
Coveo believes that best-in-class support is a mandatory feature and not a nice-to-have, which is why we include Coveo Care at no additional cost. We’ll support you each step of the way with our Customer Success team, Delivery Assurance, and Support when you need it most. We also believe that each Coveo Commerce customer should have everything they need to get started without compromising on a market-leading AI-powered search experience. You simply can’t have relevance without AI and personalization. And we won’t compromise on that.
Add-Ons Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought
We’re also making it easy to add functionality as your business thrives or right away, personalizing your solution the way you personalize for your shoppers. Our modular feature add-ons drive even more ROI and are ready to supercharge your shopping experience at any point in your digital transformation journey.
Each feature is designed to deliver on the metrics your business cares about most, backed by innovation that fuels growth. Choose from Personalization As-You-Go for 1:1 personalization for both known and anonymous shoppers, Business-Aware Product Ranking that optimizes results balanced for revenue and relevance, Generative Product Discovery that engages shoppers with a conversational experience, and Product Badging that nudges customers into action by highlighting key products.
The Bottom Line: Coveo Delivers More Value
Coveo fuels growth without adding friction, which is why we’ve shaped our pricing model to scale with your success. Whether you’re optimizing today or preparing for tomorrow, our Commerce pricing delivers relevance, results, and ROI on your terms. To sum up, here’s what you can expect from Coveo:
- Feature-rich out of the box: advanced AI and personalization are included – not upsold.
- Ready to grow with you: modular add-ons and entitlements for scaling keeps costs aligned with success.
- Fair, predictable, and transparent: clear and measurable value at a price you see upfront.
- Built for outcomes: pricing aligned to meaningful customer actions, helping you forecast and prove ROI.