This is what has been holding me back from trying out Kagi. I will probably jump over to Kagi at some point because I've noticed the quality of DDG searches going downhill as well. However, I'm firmly in Kagi's idea of 1% of Internet users. I search for anything at the drop of a hat. I just checked my history in Firefox for duckduckgo.com for "This Month" and it came back with 704 individual searches (DDG likes to add on a =web and generate a new request so I filtered for just those). My phone is an island all on its own, and I probably have another 100-150 searches on there. March and February are right around the same numbers. For fun'sies lets just say 1000 searches per month. $10/month for the 700 searches plan + 300 * 0.015 for the overages = $14.50/month.

Unlike the other comments down-thread, this number feels right. I don't like it, and my gut doesn't want to accept this. If you're not harvesting user data and/or selling ads, and the monthly subscriptions are the only source of revenue then $14.50/month sounds right.

I'm still riding this fun'sies train so lets just kick some numbers around. I suspect their FAQ might be a little out of date, but lets go with it. https://kagi.com/faq says that, "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches". 1000 searches / 80 = $12.50, so they make $2 per month from me. I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx. If it doesn't, then that $2 per month gets a bit more sad. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months states that, "Kagi search is currently serving ~2,600 paid customers." from September 1st last year. Let's say they've grown 10x since then and we're at 26,000 paying customers and they're all me. $52,000 in profit on $377,000 per month in revenue. So they're clearing $624,000 a year on this totally hypothetical scenario.

Is https://moneyconnexion.com/per-second-earnings-of-top-compan... accurate? Who knows. If it is accurate, it takes Google just shy of 15 minutes to make that same $624,000.

Mostly this is just me thinking out loud. Like I said, I'm trying to wrap my head around this pricing.