While I think your questions are definitely relevant, in practice, you search less than you think.

I consider myself as a heavy search engine user but, based on Kagi stats, I was surprised how much less I actually searched compared to my estimate. My actual range is about 500-800 queries a month when I originally estimated upwards 1500 queries a month.

Same thing with my friends.

I tried Kagi and ended up hitting limits. Unlimited sounds nice, especially since I don't need to worry about how I'm "running out of searchers" so to say, but only once I know how much it actually is instead of just assuming "well, most people don't search much".

I'm assuming they disallow bot use in their TOS. So they can probably offer unlimited searches that you run yourself by typing in the terms.

For $10 their cost for someone constantly typing new searches is significantly negative. It's surprisingly expensive for them to do a search and doing 1 search every 30 seconds for 8 hours is ~3x more than the cap of their $5 tier. I'm not saying that's a reasonable usage case for me I'm just saying the limit on profitability occurs SIGNFICANTLY sooner than "as fast as you can type for a month".

Whatever the cap is, I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you or making you do a captcha for every search. Pretty much all search services have some cap, after which they will put up roadblocks to slow you down

> I’m sure it’s a lot higher than google will let you do before they start rate limiting you

Do you have any basis for this assumption?

Google throws me around 4-5 CAPTCHAs a month with regular usage. So far, Kagi hasn't made me do any "find the firehoses".

I've been getting captchaed by Google just for using `intitle:` or `inurl:` modifiers.

It drives me bonkers when I am searching a very deep topic (like looking for specific legal decisions), and Google throws up a Captcha at me.

I am fast and good at searching, but I ain’t that good. I’m going to give Kagi a try for this reason, plus ability to prefer or ban specific sites.

When trying out Kagi (prior to unlimited searches) my monthly Google searches were significantly higher than the cap. While some definitely do get CAPTCHAs, I wasn't. Adjusting this to the new unlimited price and it would still seem to be negative profit for them, hence the question.