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This. A smaller team without all the b/s is going to have way more impact than a monster bloater full of "happiness engineers".

I imagine that their hosting costs must be quite big and not very elastic. Crawling takes compute and bandwidth, storage cost will be high, as you need to store data in low latency storage, then indexing which is more compute costs.

They may have access to talent pool willing to work for their vision at significantly reduced rates, but unless they effectively sell themself to big cloud provider, they can’t significantly reduce the infrastructure cost.

Also since Kagi is a paid product, I imagine that the amount of external funding needed is inherently less than a startup that is built on the "scale first, monetise later" model.