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.