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.