I used to use open SearXNG instances, but the results still have all the inapplicable garbage in them that I can't filter out. And the results are often incredibly slow. I switched to Kagi because it gave me better results from the get go, and I can customize to block all results from things like YouTube or various poor GitHub/StackOverflow content clones.

Where did you find hosting for SearXNG that costs less than $10/month? I have my own server and I can barely get a public reverse proxy to bypass CGNAT for that price. Also, SearXNG isn't very easy to add custom "always block these domains" lists last I looked.