Are you implying that advertising is the only viable business model? I really hope you're wrong, if so. Ads have corrupted and made worse everything they've touched online. I would really like to see a new generation of services that aren't ad-based.
Personally it seems weird to me that people assume things like search and email must be completely "free with ads," while nobody expects anything in the offline world to be free with ads. Even TV, if we're being honest, since while broadcast technically exists, it seems the vast majority of people who watch it pay for cable. Why couldn't ad-free gmail and search be a $20 addon to your internet plan? Most people couldn't function normally with NO search engine today, so what's wrong with allocating the kind of money to it that would buy 2-3 cups of coffee?
Sure, but it’s not because of the lack of ads, but rather because they know virtually nobody uses it. I was imagining paid Gmail, but Internet “with Gmail(tm)” being a bundle they would advertise, like when DirecTV offered TiVo. Or when you can buy HBO through Amazon Prime.
But nobody uses it because it isn't as good as gmail. Before Gmail, it was a lot more common to use your ISP's email. And given the current monopoly power of ISPs I'm pretty doubtful that any such bundling would be in users' best interests.
I will. As a Kagi user I loved the quality and authenticity of search results but couldn't justify paying $10 / month for it. In my view that is far too expensive for something I can get for free from Google/DDG with concessions.
Fundamentally there are only two business models available for search.
Since searching the vastness of the web in under 500ms is not free, it is either the user paying for that, or a 3rd party (usually advertisers) paying on the behalf of the user. We (Kagi) thought that for something as intimate as search the latter made no sense, hence the birth of paid search business model where incentives between the user and search engine are aligned.
Price not being right for you currently is another matter, and hopefully one day it will be (you could help by sharing feedback how to improve the product, and there is new Kagi pricing coming up soon).
I personally pay for YouTube Premium ($15/month I believe?) just to not have to see ads on any device I watch YouTube on. Many people would never consider that, but many (~25 million subscribers [1]) still do, despite being able to watch videos for free, availability of adblockers and what not. So YouTube Premium makes half a billion dollars every month and that is essentially using the same business model as Kagi's.
They license search results from other search engines, and other search engines have the ability to increase their fees anytime they want to make Kagi suffocate if needed. It's not sustainable.
There is a an objective risk of building on top of somebody else's platform. However, that does not mean that the business model is not sound, but that perhaps the execution may be limited in terms of how big it can get. (Kagi's aspiration was never to be a Google killer [1]).
Companies are built on top of other platforms all the time. TikTok is building on top of iOS and Android. Zynga made first $1bn building on top of Facebook platform. Honey a chrome extension was acquired for $4bn. Those are all businesses building on top of somebody elses platform.
In terms of Google's motiviation to suffocate it, even if Kagi had 10 million customers, it would be a drop in the sea for Google. And Kagi's very existence helps Google with monopoly issues so it is hard to see why would Google want to openly suffocate it. Even if it did, there are plenty of other search indexes out there (Bing, Yandex, Mojeek...) that Kagi can source. What users love about Kagi is not just the quality of search but innovative search features that are independent of results.
What matters at the end of the day, is that Kagi is already serving thousands of paying customers, they love the product and if anything that is the validation that a business model is working.
Does not have a sound business model. Let's not waste time on something that is not viable.