That touches on the general dissatisfaction many people have with cloud-first subscription based software. For a service like kagi, it makes sense since search needs that model. When software that doesn't need to doesn't depend one someone else's computer, the good old one time purchase option at large enough scales with optional upgrades every few years becomes more viable again.

If we get technical enough you can have a decentralized search index that's automatically distributed in a torrent-like manner so it's possible with some AI models that eventually, after a year or so, you almost don't hit the network when you search.

But nobody from the business circles wants that outcome.

We’d have a totally new equilibrium. Where would the money currently spent on advertising go?

If distributed equitably, you’d imagine we, as consumers, might not actually be worse off in net; instead of coming from advertisers, it gets sent through us to the same software companies that we currently pay by proxy through advertising.

> If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you

Except that it shouldn't. The software I use every day is not a service that incurs ongoing costs to the developer. A one-time fee is the correct model for that.