Is the project transitioning to only support Appbase as provider?

[scottroot]

I've been using Reactivesearch for a while now but have noticed that in each update it seems features that support running ReactiveSearch with your own ElasticSearch instance are being phased out. The latest update with Searchbox replacing DataSearch for example.
I am just curious if there is any official statement about this - if things are moving further toward only being able to use ReactiveSearch if you connect your ES through AppBase. FWIW I like the Appbase service and there are a lot of cool features, but with the amount of data I have in ES, it is too costly for me to switch over to hosting through Appbase, so I am just trying to get an idea for what the future development and support is expected to be for this use case.