This is not the case, the price of unit decrease with volume and you can have a big discount if you want to commit to a yearly (similar to AWS/GCP/Azure)

I fail to see where you provided him wrong, based on my math and the calculator in the backend. The existing $29 is roughly equal to $240 on the new plan 250,000 operations vs 250,000 searches. Obviously operations include adding/updating/deleting data. But if you don't do any of that it's basically a different of $220. If you do some operations, say half of them are operations you are looking at $150~ vs $29.

I see it like they're chasing the lower end of the market like single dev projects that don't want to spend much - which I guess makes sense. But for us this definitely would be a lot more expensive.

Well, if so they've failed in my case. I've got a customer doing £1m annual turnover on e-commerce, and we were about to start an integration with Algolia. The new pricing has stopped that from going ahead. I've been asked to find an alternative.

What is your stack ?

I made a simple Proof-of-concept of a PHP backend based on Redisearch compatible with the Instantsearch.js library.

You can take a look at it here : https://github.com/MKCG/algolia-on-redisearch/tree/master/ap...

With the Covid crisis we were no longer able to pay 3K per month for a basic search engine and now we are using a solution based on this on production (> 30M search/month).