They offer unlimited searches for $10/month, you don’t need to do metered billing

Kinda. Their Search API is not freely available, and I believe their current cost structure is preventing its popularisation.

Which means I can’t embed Kagi Search or Assistant into my open source products because APIs are second-class citizens.

To be fair, it seems like this makes sense for them economically, and maybe it even makes sense for growing in the right direction.

But as someone who would rather use their API, it’s a pity Search and Assistant aren’t there.

I am sample size 1 of people! I love metered billing! I would gladly use metered plan with top-up credit if kagi had one.

Once I tried openrouter, I am not touching any subscription LLM providers.

Google/Microsoft/Apple "all-in-one" personal subscriptions are a different beast, because they charge well below cost.