If you eg index geonames, you have 4 mio. records but you might only have 50.000 queries a month. you pay $4,000 for minimal compute resources, 4GB of RAM and 3 gigabytes of storage space. Would be less but algolia requires you to create a replica for each sort option separately.

With 4 mio. records and 4 mio. queries I would pay the same. But then at least have 4 mio. queries.

The other way around, if we would just index all 200+ countries in the world and have autocomplete with a lot of visitors we would pay for eg 50.000 users per day typing in 3 letters again $4.000.

Same for us, we offer 350.000 movies with 2 mio. scenes. With Typesense or even Elasticsearch Cloud we would pay 5% of what we would pay Algolia.