[jlemoine]

(I am the co-founder and CTO of Algolia).

Thanks for your feedback, we have some more work to make our pricing page clear. We need to add a simulator on this page.

The reason of this indirection is that we still have to deal with data/record. It is unfortunately not possible to pay only for searches, you can imagine a use case that push 100GB of data and perform only a few searches. The unit gives access to 1k searches request and 1k records. For the majority of users, they will pay per searches.

For SaaS use case, we have a different pricing where we price per GB with volume discount.

There is a volume discount, so the more units you consume, the cheaper they are. And if you commit to a year, the volume discount applies on your your yearly capacity. This give you a significant discount if you commit to a year. This is how you can have overages. Of course if you stay on a month-to-month play, there is no overages.