I'm paying ~10 bucks for spotify to stream music non stop. I'm also paying netflix some ~16 bucks for 4K movies/series. There's no way a text search is more expensive than a 4k, 5.1 channels movie.
I'm using Kagi since they were in beta, but as soon as my subscription expires, I'm done...
It certainly can be more expensive than streaming. Bandwidth is very cheap. (Cloud provider bandwidth charges are completely artificial and pure profit.) Search requires a lot more compute and fast storage as well as more developers since it’s a much harder problem.
Arbitrary and quite possibly unique searches over substantially all knowledge ever produced by humanity seem a lot harder than sending an unchanging large file over a network.
And since Bing rasing prices affects their price so much, I'd argue that Kagi isn't investing enough into their own crawler/index, so that they can ultimately bring down the price of search.
Instead they're integrating yet another third-party (OpenAI), thereby rasing the price even more and tying their price to third-party API pricing even more.
Google seems to be free, but they are making a profit by gatekeeping the internet. If you offer a product or service, and you want people to find your restaurant, your hotel, your guided tour, your private tutoring lessons, or anything else, you pretty much have to pay Google.
It's kinda like the Yellow Pages, except 100x more expensive.
If you as a user don't want your search results dictated by who pays the most, it's going to be expensive.