High earning does not necessarily mean wealthy. Rich people in my eyes don't even need to work. People also often gain more money by not spending everything all nilly willy. Someone inheriting a lot of money is more likely to spend it on something superfluous than someone that meticulously grew it over their lifetime.

Saying you aren’t a trust fund baby therefore you aren’t rich is just plain silly.

Your point is totally valid, but I think the folks over at r/fatfire are probably wealthier than us peasants here.

you're talking circles in circles, in a venn-diagram sense. probably a non-trivial overlap there with HN users.

if you know what an SRE III is, and where those exist, chances are you're in the global 1%, and top 25% of US earners.

and yah i get not everyone on HN is STEM, and not all STEM is super-lucrative, but the parent poster is directionally correct.

I can't pay $20/month for EVERY site and tool.

I'm happy to pay the current $120 I do for Kagi, but that's my upper limit.

I do have some web tools I pay $250 a year for, and they are significantly more complicated than kagi.

With Kagi's new pricing, I will be paying >$300 a year. That is too much. They aren't THAT much better. That is literally more than my beefy dedicated gaming server in a datacenter!

That's basically my point. HN people are wealthy and spend most of their working hours and free time on the internet. They also vehemently hate ad-supported business models.

Hell, I probably built my entire career off internet searches.

In theory, HN people should have the most to gain from a better search engine, and be the most likely to pay for one. Yet, to your point, the alternatives are free and good enough.

The problem is, what the mob moralistically claims they want on HN (when upvotes/downvotes are a concern), vs. what those same people actually do in the real world on an individual level, are two separate things.

The lesson is, things evolved the way they have on the internet for a reason. It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars, and will continue to do so. We get exactly the products we deserve.

These are the early days of paid search. Kagi laucnhed less than a year ago, after 25 years of humanity being "massaged" with the idea that it is OK for your searches (arguable both the most important and most intimate thing you do online) to be paid by someone else, an unknown 3rd party, usually an advertiser.

The early resistance towards a paid model is to be expected. But if we can learn from the example of YouTube Premium (25M+ subscribers for a product available for free), there are millions of people ready to pay for search today, we just haven't reached them.

It's not paid vs free, it's $120/year versus $300/year.

There is no Kagi plan that costs >$300/year? Most is ultimate which is $255/year. (point still taken)

> It's not some "evil" companies shoving these ad-supported business models down our throats. We have all voted with our eyeballs and our (lack of) dollars

No reason both can't be true. evil companies can shovel ad-supported business models down our throats while the few paid options which have emerged haven't offered users enough value to justify the fees, being forced to be logged into an account, or having to worry about how many searches you make in a day.