[0]My opinion. Probably true.
In all seriousness, I am sure you are right and don’t deny the promise on offer. I’d also be willing to pay for search much more so than many other online services of more questionable value.
But I just don’t think they’re going to get cut-through at $5, not least $10, in the way they might exponentially do so if they could stretch to an entry tier that really starts to feel accessible to a much, much wider set of people.
WhatsApp took over the world at $1/year.
Things cost money. Some people can't afford a certain product. Some people don't want a certain product. But you don't see people in the grocery store arguing all day why they don't want to purchase a certain product on the shelf.
And people spend a tremendous amount of time discussing the price of essential goods like groceries. Economists go bananas of it. Especially in some regions with a cost of living crisis. What a strange example to make.
After infrastructure and DNS, I think it's the most important tool for using the internet (at least for most people in most cases). It's what most people use to actually find information. It saves me uncountable hours each year.
Need to find a phone number to a company? I don't have to guess what their domain is, I just search for "<company> Phone Number" and probably land on an "About Us" page.
Need to find an owners manual to a device? I don't need to browse for 20 minutes on the product vendor's website.
Trying to look up an error in code? I don't have to search Github, StackOverflow, Gitlab, that tiny self-hosted forum for the library throwing an error, and Reddit individually.
And ultimately, ad-supported search presents a conflict of interest: what information should the search engine return to you? A near-exact result you're looking for or advertiser-funded results to be presented first? Whoever provides search has to raise money somehow, and they aren't going to sell ads if the advertiser results are always at the bottom.
Lastly, Hackernews seems primarily geared towards North America/Western Europe/AU(?)/NZ(?). For this area, generally, $5 is not unreasonably expensive.
My hunch is that they are happy just growing a sustainable business. And I say good for them.
Similar to why many people pay for OpenOffice and Ubuntu. They want them to keep existing.
Another idea might be if they partnered with some other service provider so they were a line item on something people are already comfortable paying for. I could imagine a cross-promo where you paid a few bucks extra a month when subscribing to like Fastmail or Proton to get Kagi with it. There's likely a fair cross appeal there.