This feels really amateur-ish. I am a customer of Kagi and I wish them to succeed.
So what were they doing up until now? Tax fraud?
Paying for search is uncommon for regular folk, I was hesitant to pay for it as well but $10 felt like a good spot for the value I'm getting. If the price hikes again and gets to $15 area, I'm switching back to DDG (I have no use for AI features so it's not a big differentiator to me).
It was a conscious decision. Typically you are not required to collect sales tax until crossing a certain threshold of number of customers or sales volume. When we started two years ago we had no idea if paid search will take off, and we decided to postpone this integration (which is incredibly complex and resource intensive) in favor or building the product. Since we made it we have to start collecting it as per tax laws.