It’s wild that they are not breaking even with these prices. I’ve had an annual subscription since January and made nearly 5000 searches. Extrapolating to a year, I will have been paying about $0.17 per search. If that would go to the electricity bill then it corresponds to about 1 kWh of energy per search, enough to run a 50-watt laptop PC for 20 hours.
Kagi has good search results and they are presented well. It also has some useful features like forbidding certain sites and prioritizing others. I like that by paying I’m the customer and not the product. And their “small web” initiative is commendable.
That said, I’ve been a customer for nine months on an annual subscription, and I will not be renewing. The first reason is that I find them just too expensive for what they do. The second is that, even being that expensive, they’re not breaking even. That undermines my trust in their future as a search engine and makes me less interested in paying a little extra for a good cause.