How AgencyHub Delivers Enterprise-Grade Search for 12 Clients at Startup Prices

"With AACsearch, we provision a new client's search in 15 minutes. Each client thinks they have their own dedicated search infrastructure — and they do. We just manage it all from one dashboard." — Marcus Weber, Technical Director at AgencyHub

Metadata

Company: AgencyHub — full-service digital agency serving mid-market e-commerce brands
Industry: Agency / Web Development
Size: 12 active clients, 500k+ total products indexed, 800k+ monthly search queries
Previous solution: Mixed — some clients on managed search providers, some on self-hosted traditional search backends, some on Shopify's built-in search
Use case: Agency-managed search for e-commerce clients
AACsearch since: November 2025

1. The Problem

AgencyHub manages e-commerce sites for 12 mid-market brands, each with 5,000–100,000 products. Their search infrastructure was a fragmented mess:

managed search providers clients (5). Each client had their own managed search providers account with separate billing. Total: ~$2,500/month. The agency had to log into 5 different managed search providers dashboards to monitor search quality.

traditional search backends clients (3). AgencyHub ran a shared traditional search backends cluster and used application-level logic to separate client data. Any schema change risked affecting all clients on the cluster.

Shopify native search (4). These clients used Shopify's built-in search — limited features, no analytics, and the agency couldn't optimize it.

"The overhead was killing us," says Marcus Weber, Technical Director at AgencyHub. "We were managing 5 managed search providers accounts, a fragile traditional search backends cluster, and we couldn't upsell search improvements to our Shopify clients because we had nothing to offer."

2. The Solution

AgencyHub consolidated all clients onto AACsearch for three reasons:

Multi-tenancy built-in — each client gets isolated search collections with scoped API tokens, all under one account
White-label ready — the embeddable widget is fully customizable, matching each client's branding
Per-client analytics — separate analytics per client showing search volume, top queries, and zero-result rate

The migration was executed client by client over two weeks:

managed search providers migration: Used AACsearch's import API for direct migration. Average: 2 hours per client.
traditional search backends migration: Exported per-client data and imported into separate collections. Average: 3 hours per client.
Shopify upgrade: For the 4 Shopify clients, AgencyHub installed the AACsearch widget as a search overlay, replacing Shopify's built-in search. Average: 1 hour per client.
White-label branding: Customized the search widget's CSS, colors, and fonts for each client's brand identity.

"Each client got a detailed migration document. None of them noticed any downtime," says Weber.

3. The Results

| Metric | Before (Mixed) | After (AACsearch) | Improvement | | ----------------------------------- | ----------------- | ----------------- | ------------------ | | Monthly search cost (all clients) | ~$3,800 | $499 (Pro plan) | 7.6x reduction | | Time to onboard new client | 3-5 days | 15 minutes | 99% faster | | Search latency (avg across clients) | 80-200ms | 8-15ms | 10x faster | | Client dashboards to monitor | 9 separate logins | 1 dashboard | Single pane | | Client-reported search satisfaction | 3.8/5 (aggregate) | 4.6/5 | +21% | | Search-related support tickets | 12/month | 2/month | 83% reduction |

The bottom line: AgencyHub reduced their search infrastructure costs from $3,800/month to $499/month, while improving search performance and adding analytics for all 12 clients — including the 4 who previously had only Shopify's basic search.

4. The Agency Model

AgencyHub now offers "Enterprise Search" as a packaged add-on service:

Setup fee: $500 per client (one-time)
Monthly management fee: $200 per client
Client cost: Lower than what each client would pay individually for managed search providers or traditional search backends

This generates $2,400/month in recurring revenue for AgencyHub, on top of the $499 they pay for the Pro plan — a 5x margin.

"We've turned search from a cost center into a profit center," says Weber. "Our clients get better search than they could build themselves, and we make money on it."

5. Technical Details

Documents indexed: 500,000+ products across 12 collections
Features used: Multi-tenancy (scoped API tokens), faceted search, typo tolerance, custom ranking, analytics, white-label widget
Integrations: Custom API for real-time product updates, Shopify app, HTML/JS widget
Agency-specific config: Each client collection has custom ranking rules based on their product categories and priority fields
Migration timeline: 14 days total (all 12 clients migrated with zero downtime)