$49 per month is 'costly'? That's barely 1/2 an hour of developer time. That's an absolute bargain. If it took a developer 6 hours to build an in house solution, that just cost as much as a year of Algolia. And that dev time doesn't even include the servers or maintenance costs. $49 is nothing. It would actually be irresponsible to not spend that amount because you'd be focusing reasorces wastefully by building something you needn't build. It's like people who hire a Dev Ops guy when Heroku would cost them $2000 per month; instead they'll pay AWS $1500 and then a full time salary to manage it. Or, to put it into perspective; $49 per month is probably hundreds less than a typical ping-ping startup spends on microbrews for the beer fridge.
An in-house solution and the resulting acquired expertise may provide a great deal more inherent value.
And what's irresponsible is using software (languages, architecture, deployment methods) so inefficient that you need to spend $2000/mo to host a minimal deployment.
