I really wish they named the paid service DuckDuckPro

I didn't know they have a "Pro" offer. I wish Kagi has something similar. It's quite expensive paying 10 bucks for search results only.

Honestly I doubt it.

Considering the speed at which models are improving, and more importantly, the speed at which models have begun improving per unit compute, I would bet that AI models at least as good as ChatGPT 3.5 will be free to use like this forever.

Right now there is so much interest/demand, and so much money sloshing around to provide it, that it's easy to find.

By the time the AI market cools off a little bit, I would expect that the cost to run a model meeting the current quality of ChatGPT 3.5 will be next-to-free.

Will near-state-of-the-art models be free forever? Absolutely not. But state-of-the-art circa late 2022 models are probably the quality basement, and free models will be at least that good.

As a user I dislike this kind of temporary free products. It feels dishonest and unreliable to me.