Frequently asked questions
Real objections, answered from what the system actually does — not marketing copy.
How is my data handled?
Your lists live in your own tenant. Every tenant’s data is isolated from every other tenant’s, so one account can never read another’s lists.
Credentials, usage records and the audit log are stored apart from your list data and are not reachable through any public API.
The autocomplete path that answers a keystroke never queries your database. It serves your published, immutable version from the edge.
Where does my data live?
Your lists, authoring work and account settings are stored in your tenant in the AutoSugges control plane.
When you publish, a verified, immutable version is served from the edge, close to your users. What is served is always the verified output of a publish, never your work in progress.
What happens when I hit my quota?
The API returns a structured quota_exceeded response — never a partial result, and never placeholder items standing in for a real one.
Usage is counted on our side for every request that is served, so quota cannot be bypassed by repeating a request.
Quota-exceeded responses are marked non-cacheable, so an intermediary cannot keep serving them after you upgrade.
Can I self-host, or what if you disappear?
AutoSugges is a hosted service. Your lists are your data and you can export them at any time in an ordinary format, so you are never locked in.
AutoSugges is built and operated independently, without a support contract or a funding round behind it. That is a real fact worth weighing, not a promise this page can make disappear. Exports and immutable published versions mean nothing already running breaks silently.
Why not a search engine or a database LIKE query?
A database LIKE query runs against your database on every keystroke — connection overhead, query planning and disk latency for something that should feel instant. AutoSugges prepares your list when you publish it, so a lookup is a fast read, not a live scan.
A general-purpose search cluster is real operational weight for a narrower problem: running and scaling a separate service for queries that are almost always a short prefix rather than free-text search.
Hosted full-text search products are built for indexing arbitrary documents. AutoSugges is narrower on purpose: it serves ranked suggestions for lists of values, from the edge.
How fast is it, and why?
A query is answered from a pre-built version of your list served at the edge. There is no database call and no origin server in the request path.
Speed comes from doing the expensive work once, when you publish, rather than on every keystroke.
Do you see my users' queries?
Queries are answered by AutoSugges and are not attached to end-user identity — the signals used for ranking identify list items and request ids, not people.
Selection events (what somebody picked, to improve future ranking) are recorded as aggregate signal, asynchronously — never in the response your users wait on.
How do you handle personal data?
AutoSugges is designed to minimize personal data by default: the product identifies list items and request ids for ranking, not end-user identities, and does not build per-user personalization or store end-user PII.
See /privacy and /dpa for what is actually collected about you as a tenant — account email, usage aggregates, audit records — and the sub-processors involved.
What does a publishable key expose?
A publishable key is not a secret and is assumed to be observable — it ships in your client bundle, exactly like any other publishable key pattern. It identifies your list and can be restricted to your own origins.
It cannot be used to write, mutate or delete anything, and it cannot reach a private list from an origin that is not on its allow-list. Rate limits and quota apply to it regardless of how many times it is copied, so a leaked key does not buy unbounded reads.
A key can be revoked or rotated at any time; a revoked key stops working on its very next request.
How do I migrate off?
Your lists are your data and you can export them at any time — there is no proprietary export format standing between you and your own list.
Leaving means taking your exported list elsewhere; nothing about how AutoSugges serves it is required to keep using it.