I can confirm -- the pieces got smaller and the price went up. We've taken five minis off the market because of this.
I had the same experience with sprued vs. unsprued pieces yesterday. The part-count charge must be extreme, because I uploaded both versions and the unsprued one was more than triple the price (even after applying the sintershell).
In order to compare price changes can you provide links to both models or the model id's. That way we can directly compare the two models and the generated prices. Nothing has changed with the pricing model recently that I know of.
Alan, I did replace the files on the minis with the new files. I didn't create new minis as I expected to simply replace the files with ones that would be less expensive as they were smaller. The following are no longer for sale: WRU797PJY 9QMZXHCSS WH5VH45CU GVLZCUEJ3 6BK4CL6NF
Avim; I cannot provide the files directly without permission from adbinc as I was sculpting on their behalf, but the items they pointed you to are the ones in question.