Rather, I asked the Neeva support person if the $6 price was sustainable, and if they foresaw a need to raise prices. I mentioned that Kagi called out increased costs from Bing, and asked if Neeva was impacted as well, and whether $6 was enough to support their costs.
I was hoping to mostly just let them know that customers care about this stuff, but they responded to me by saying that they have an in-house index and Bing costs are not a problem for them, due to their private index.
So even though they likely answered my question honestly that Bing costs increasing didn’t impact them as much as it did Kagi, it seems they had much bigger cost problems instead!
DuckDuckGo is at it after all these years, building it brick by brick, if you will. Neeva's problem might have been the opportunity cost to their engineering and executive orgs in pursuing such a drawn out build. They'd rather latch onto something that could grow much faster, and frankly, Enterpise + LLMs is right in their alley. It is a nice pivot and not representative of much else (don't mean to discount that consumer products are hard, especially when the competition is BigTech themselves).
Offtopic, but what answer were you expecting?
"Thank you for your message. We advise you not to start using our services, we are on the brink of shutting down, just haven't announced it yet."