This thread has been very interesting to follow. But again most of the discussion is for the nerds that is members of this forum, not for all of the ones that is merchants only, not tech freaks. What shoud they choose, They ofc want a very good system. Not all of them will go to Shopify or Bigcommerce or whatever, its very expensive. So for them it reall does not matter, Algolia is there quite easy to setup but can cost a lot. But that is really the same for Elastic. If you want to use the Cloudservice they provide, it quite quickly get very high priced.
Why is it so? Computer power and bandwidth is cheap nowadays. I would like to see a very good TB module that can connect to a good priced Elastic provider. Not one that charge hundreds and hundreds per month. It is fully possible, someone just have to start