I recently signed up for an annual subscription to Kagi on their Starter plan and I couldn't agree more. Search quality with them has been great so far, and I realize their small web search and exploration features too.

I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.