Lol at 10 times? What about 100 times? Does it start losing value?
Google is not worried about a paid search engine that indexes less and if they were they would buy kagi. And yes Kagi would sell.
People aren't always as money motivated as that. The founder of Kagi is pretty intent on making it work well. And given the way they're raising I don't think money is the pure driver, but making the business sustainable. I wouldn't believe they haven't had offers already.
$10 is a couple of cups of coffee or a cheap lunch in my area. I use Kagi a dozen times a day for work. The value proposition is very good. Every once in a while I’ll use a computer that doesn’t have Kagi and remember how much Google stinks these days.
Eventually Google is going to wise up and cut off Kagi’s API access. But until then I’m very happy to pay $10/month for greatly improved search.