Once you are navigating these waters, it might pay to ask for a definition of ‘active’.

This is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake.

I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.

Technically, they do

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149

But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as you're imagining

No need to really - users + revenue is enough to figure it out. And you want to see revenue anyway.

(I'm one of those small investors in Kagi.)

I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.

The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.