I looked it up*
https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#kagisearch
It’s $.0125, so 1.25 cents not double digits like I thought. They also average 27 searches per day per user. So an average of 821.25 searches per user per month, meaning a cost of $10.27 per month.
It’s probably as good as we are going to get.
The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.
We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though – kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.
It’s also privately owned by one guy, so it doesn’t have to submit to investor pressure.
Steam, for example, is basically a monopoly for PC game sales, but hasn’t enshittified because it is privately owned.
I had a 2023 Elantra, and iirc it had these features for $30 a year after my subscription ended.
These prices are way higher. Seems like every company agreed that subscription = $10(ish) a month, regardless of the actual cost the features justify.