Petco/Petsmart/Walmart are notorious for selling Common Plecos without telling the buyer that they will become 2' long. Or that putting them in a tank that is to small will cause stunting, which deforms their spine, causes internal damage and drastically shortens their life span.
When it comes to smaller Plecos there are a lot of them, not just the BN.
Although the BN are usually the better priced of the smaller Plecos. You can go to online fish stores to see which ones you like the best before you go to the store to actually buy anything. That way you will know what your buying and won't get conned into buying a Pleco that's wrong for your tank size.There are also several types of BN Plecos you can get, other than the standard brown or Albino.
Here are a couple examples, The Long Fin Albino BN are very Elegant, the Green Dragons are Cool(especially with kids). The Gold Nuggets are really beautiful but cost about $50.00 each. Depending on the size of the other BN when you buy it, they can be as low as $8.99 for an inch and a half, to $15.99 for 2-3".
The last photo is to show you what you can get stuck with if you don't know what you want before you go into the store. With Plecos, it can be a big buyer beware in a lot of stores that don't really know what they are doing.
I presently have 2 Long Fin & 2 Green Dragons. So far they all seem strong and hardy and easy to care for, even when they were very small.
My Grandson likes all of them, but he seems to really like the Dragons. It's probably just the name, but for a 10 year old boy? Having a couple of Dragons is awfully cool.
And all of mine do eat the algae off the decorations and the tank walls. I've never had to clean any algae off my tank walls, and I have 4 tanks.
The only time I've had to clean any algae is when I had a brown algae outbreak from to much sun shinning on one of my tanks. Once I started leaving the tank lights off while the sun was shinning on the tank, the brown went away