Kagi looks neat but they’d have to have absolutely amazing results if they want me to pay for them, which I doubt they have… And sorry, but paying $10/month for a fucking search engine (where the actual cost per user is negligible and profit scales with number of users extremely nicely) is just insane.
I guess Google would make at most about $1/month off of ads from me… if I didn’t block them. I’d be willing to pay that, maybe up to $3 for a really good service. But this is just insane, and continues the trend of “oh you like a service that’s not complete crap? I guess you should pay an order of magnitude (or several) more than what’s necessary to provide that service, because fuck you, what can you do?”
If I had to pay for every service like that I’d probably spend $500/month just for that and then they’d still figure out that hey, we can still put ads in and make a little bit more cuz why not, what are they gonna do?