Actually the comparison with Netflix is quite apt. For twice the price I get lots (and I really mean lots) of shows streamed to my house. In contrast here, here I get a search service that is provided by others for free. For the average Joe the value proposition is very different. So you really have to be valuing privacy very strongly and/or have significant disposible income.

Note I actually like the service and I signed up for the beta, but I understand the GPs point about building two "webs" one for the masses and one for the "well off" that can afford these tools. However as one other poster said, you have to bootstrap a service somehow and if it gets popular enough there could be the ability to reduce fees to give it mass appeal.

There is I think one distinction in the analogy to be made. We shall not put the sign of equation between services offered by Kagi and Google, because we are not for example doing the same for Netflix and Youtube.

One may pay Netflix because there are _specific_ shows that they can not get anywhere else, or simply because the quality and convenience is much higher than if they tried to watch those or other shows in different ways, including free.

In similar fashion, Kagi offers a completely different product/search experience to Google, with different results, different features and attention to detail like you would expect from a premium service obsessed with user experience. Saying that Google is offering same thing like Kagi but for free, is ignoring this nuance and is same as saying that all streamed video content is the same, or that every comedy show is the same.

I see value in paying for a service which would curate results by eliminating content farms.

Average Joe would also not see any value as he doesn't know what a content farm is to begin with.

It's all about finding a niche (and selling out once you're on track to get traction, but alas).

And how many people share their logins to avoid having a bunch of fees from different services? I bet its more common on the lower end of the income spectrum.

When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight

> When you're making 15/hour with a family things are pretty tight

Correct. But what Volvo invented (3 point safety belt and more) soon became standard in ordinary cars.

Say Kagi is a luxury product for some people: it will still open the road for others to see that it is possible to carve out a niche that isn't as crowded as ad-sponsored-idiotic-AI-manipulated-answers-for-everyone-and-noone-at-the-same-time.

Neeva is freemium.

I think you.com is freemium too.

Marginalia is free and at this point so good that it is sometimes a better fallback from DDG than Google is. (To be fair, Marginalia is a side project running on a single desktop pc in Sweden somewhere but Google is that bad these days that if DDG doesn't have you covered chanses are Google doesn't either. And then marginalia comes in with a delightfully different ranking, respecting my queries and allowing me to find things - if they exists in its index.)