Algolia Search and Discovery

We tested almost every search app out there and spent countless hours finding the right search for our shopify store, robotvacuums.com. We also ported it to another site, freedomusasales.com
Algolia is not only better than all search engines, it completely blows all other apps out of the game.
I cannot understand any of the low reviews except A: Lazy ignorant people who do not understand what they are missing out on or B: Jealous competitors who know their goose is cooked.
Other search apps are just modifications of the built in shopify search, which is extremely lacking in features. Some are so backwards that you cannot even type a search term in middle of a sentence, it will not show results.
We are still new to algolia and learning how to harness it but seeing the bad reviews is so categorically false and wrong on so many levels that it just gets me angry and we had to write something...
Thanks!

Very overpriced for our needs. Post-sales customer support is slow. The tool itself is pretty quick and slick (once setup, however you will need a professional developer to install it, certainly not a plug-and-play setup. Online documentation and knowledgbase is very technical. Support just send you links to the knowledgebase each time). We have been oversold a package for which we didn't come close to using the quota. Would only recommend for enterprise-level websites.

It is very difficult to set up and use. You need an IT expert to be able to use this application.
I've spent days trying to find a way to use it, but it doesn't work.
The support team responds very slowly.

A little bit tough to get it started, but once I did I really liked the final results. There is a ridiculous amount of power in this that you can use if you want to (but pay for it). This is close to enterprise level search for a reasonable price per month.

We removed Algolia because the free 10k operations don't last long at all. This includes all indexing, searching (per key), etc. If they had a cheaper intro plan we'd probably jump in, but I'll look around to see if there's another option at the price point we need.

No longer supported - plan to replace

From github: https://github.com/algolia/instantsearch.js/issues/3309

"Note that InstantSearch v1 is no longer supported. "

This is the version shopify uses.

In the last week. I have contacted algolia twice for help with things not working as expect. Both times they gave the impression that shopify is not important and would not help.

I wanted to add an exclude for some customers, so some product would be excluded from the search, but this feature does not work. When I asked for help they said the shopify version was not supported.

While the basic search is impressive, adding options as been a problem, with features not working for me.

Update: They plan upgrade shopify to InstantSearch v2 in a few months. This looks to fix my current issues. InstantSearch v2: https://codesandbox.io/s/l598wkxoy7