Hi David,
Thank you for your feedback on the plugin. To clarify, we do not impose any sort of restrictions on your ability to use Autosuggest regardless of whether you self-host, use a cloud provider, or use our ElasticPress.io service. All you need to do is add your Autosuggest endpoint (this is the same as your search endpoint) in the ElasticPress plugin settings under the Autosuggest Feature. We have many, many folks in the WordPress community using Autosuggest quite successfully who host their own infrastructure.
Can you clarify where and how you’ve asked us for support? I see one ticket on Github from you where we responded to your questions https://github.com/10up/ElasticPress/issues/1041 that has been closed for months. We did our best to help you, but ultimately we are unable to provide free support for issues related to server-side problems and we do ask that folks refer to existing Github issues to find questions that have already been answered.
We are also not able to recommend approaches to securing your server and/or exposing Autosuggest endpoints, since privacy is a major concern and we are not qualified to advise you on the best way to secure an Elasticsearch server within your unique infrastructure.
If you feel there is a bug in the current version (2.8.2) that is preventing you from getting Autosuggest working, please provide a Github ticket and include screenshots of the settings page where you’ve configured Autosuggest. This will enable us to pinpoint the issue. Again, if it’s related to the plugin, we will be happy to fix this for free.
