Short version: the free plan on AI Search is now 10,000 embeddings per month instead of 2,000, and the daily 200-embedding cap is gone. Existing free users are already on the new limits — no reinstall, no reconnect needed. New installs pick it up automatically.
Why the change
The old numbers came from a very conservative first cut. In practice they were too tight in the exact moment merchants needed room: the first day. A store with 200 products would spend 200 embeddings just syncing the catalogue during the setup wizard — that’s already 10% of the monthly quota gone before a single visitor ran a search. Combine that with the 200-per-day cap and the merchant would hit the limit mid-testing, get a warning banner, and reasonably conclude that the plugin was going to nickel-and-dime them into a paid plan.
That was never the intent. The free plan is meant to be usable indefinitely for small and medium sites without asking for a credit card. 5× the monthly headroom and no daily throttle makes that actually true.
What’s in the free plan now
- 10,000 embeddings per month per site. Enough for a store with roughly 500 products and 250 daily searches, or a content-heavy blog with 1,000 posts and light traffic.
- No daily cap. Use them however you want across the month.
- Monthly usage resets on the anniversary of when the site first connected to the service — there’s no calendar-boundary cliff on the 1st of the month.
- Runs on OpenAI’s
text-embedding-3-small(the smaller of the two current embedding models). Standard and Pro plans use the largertext-embedding-3-large, which is materially more precise on multilingual queries but not a night-and-day difference on typical English content. - Everything else stays the same: unlimited sites can install and connect, semantic search is on by default, and the tiered result system (exact SKU/title → keyword matches → AI extras) works identically to the paid plans.
When you outgrow the free plan
The paid plans exist for two situations: you have more content or more traffic than the free plan covers, or you want the higher-precision text-embedding-3-large model. Standard is 25,000/month with a 2,500 daily throttle; Pro pools 100,000/month across up to 10 sites and includes priority support. Pricing hasn’t changed — only the free plan.
Both paid plans include a 7-day free trial. If you’re unsure whether you need to upgrade at all, the honest answer is: probably not, unless you’re running a bigger store than you might realise. The new free plan handles more than most sites need.
How to check what you’re using
The Quota tab inside the plugin’s admin (AI Search → General → Quota) shows your current month’s usage and how much is left. If you were watching a scary red bar last week, refresh it (or wait up to six hours for the cached number to update) and you should see something a lot friendlier.
The plugin is on the WordPress.org repository. If you’re already installed, no update is required — the change happened service-side. If you’re considering installing, this feels like a friendlier moment than it did a week ago.