Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That’s very expensive to do. There’s two options as to how to pay for it:
Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do
The latter is what people mean when they say “you’re the product”. The advertisers are the customers.
self-host a searx instance
Two totally different things.
Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.