Every product in the world sells itself as being as cheap as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea "so just pay it, cheapo". If that excuse actually worked, nobody would be drinking tea or coffee because we'd have spent our money on random apps and services.

It's necessary to prove an app brings more joy than a good $5 drink does--most products fail to cross that threshold.

I find such pitches more a reminder that we’ve somehow decided $5 is an acceptable price for a cup of flavored and slightly chemically enhanced water.

You're not paying $5 for the cup. You're paying $5 for the guy making it for you at a moment's notice, for the warm couch to sit in while you drink it, and for the other guy who comes after you leave and cleans after you.

People have been paying money for food and beverages forever. The cost of labor is a big factor in it. It's the foundation of the economy.

Good point and I've also written elsewhere about subscription exhaustion or something like that (I think I had a better term for it then).

I think I wrote something like "if a product requires a subscription I don't consider it unless it replaces another subscription - or is so good that it is obviously worth it".

Well, for me this is the second category: For me Kagi is a fantastic deal at $10 (although I hesitate to say it since it probably means they'll end up charging more ;-)

Agreed, most apps are useless to most people, just like most people don’t read most books. And I’m not recommending the comparison to a cup of coffee as marketing.

For me there is absolutely no difference in paying $1/month and $10/month for a daily driver search engine and I’m letting everyone know this to establish dominance over OP.

That's $130,000 in 30 years if invested at a 6% annual return, compounded daily.

In other words, shave off a year of your career at least and retire instead.

I get that you live in a tent and eat peanuts and lentils everyday with water? Imagine if you calculate your savings with this lifestyle. You could retire a decade before everyone else!

No, I don't live in a tent, not at all! I have a gym membership that costs my family $500 a month. But, when we go there, we get unlimited classes, a pool, hot tub, sauna, steam sauna – it's good for our physical well-being, and it acts as extra rented real estate. They offer an hour of child care included per visit, so it's a break from parenting while we work out.

$5 tea or coffee is just flavored water that I can make at home for 50 cents and minimal effort.

Obviously, to each their own, but $5 tea was a bad example.

And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad blockers are free.

I've been using Kagi for a couple of weeks now and I love it. It's not just that there are no ads, but at least for programming, the first page is not stuffed with weird spammy sites that scrape Stackoverflow and Github Issues, like it is on Google nowadays.

Add blockers would not make the result better though. For me google is useless nowadays. If a search engine surfice that truly find what I'm looking for I'll pay $10/month for it but I think the price may be too much for those that don't care as much about the search result quality.

> And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad blockers are free.

Even if Google was completely free and didn't track me and didn't insult me with their ad matching, paying $10 a month for results that are in another league is fine with me.

You just described lean fire, which is a thing some people do.

If I still haven’t beaten the game of life or cracked the buried treasure chest or rescued the sultry wicked smaht blonde princess from the tower of doom thirty years from now safe to say it isn’t happening and I’ll just seppuku. But until then I’m going to drink tea in cafes and mumble about nihilism.

Just an example! Being frugal is a balance, because if you go too far on the extreme of that spectrum you end up doing really crazy stuff to save money, and then die and leave your stash to your next of kin. That's certainly not what I'm advocating for!

Still, $5 for a cup of tea is a really terrible example because it's an incredible waste – tea is very easy to make. Technically, when you buy some tea somewhere else you're wasting time rather than saving it, since an electric kettle is much faster.

A mildly better example: at least when you pay $5 for a Starbucks nitro cold brew, you're getting something that isn't realistically available at home (unless you want to buy/clean/store/operate a nitrogen coffee kegerator).

$10/month for a search engine...I mean, you can just block ads and trackers for free. Microsoft literally pays you money to use their search engine. It's not like streaming services where paying for ad removal saves you time.