With ~200M Firefox users and Google paying ~$400M annually, a $5/month subscription from just 7% of users would fully replace that search deal revenue.

nobody is going to pay $5 a month for firefox. they might pay 99 cents a month or $10 a year or something.

I willingly pay $5/month for Kagi. I'd willingly pay $5/month for Firefox.

Completely unrelated but being that typographically close to "onion browser" made me confused for a second or two

One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.

Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.

Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?

Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.

The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.

Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.

Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.

That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.

I think people like me do register on the radar, see platforms like substack, kagi, bandcamp or patreon to mention a few. Linux is more popular than ever and keeps slowly growing.

It won't happen overnight, but there are now viable businesses out there with non-ad business models. Yes they're not as large as Google, but I don't think they need to be either.

3/4 million paying users for Nebula seems like a success story. No one expects a service with niche educational-type information to take off like a free hot video game.

converting 5% of users to paying is frankly beyond plausibility, if they got 0.1% I'd consider that a miracle

Only if the product sucks. Kagi converts at much higher than that. It incentivizes Mozilla to create a better product, a wonderful positive feedback loop.

I pay for Kagi. I generally find it to be adequate at the moment --- not wonderful, but better than other options available. And unlike other options, Kagi is improving slowly over time.

That said, your point about the incentives is spot on. It is the primary reason that I pay for Kagi: they have the incentive to deliver good results and even improve. They even talk about this on their website [1].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.

(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)

Any link to the coverage on what made you change your mind?

Cloudflare also seems to be OK to work with R companies...

I tried Orion and it was the crashiest app I used on my macbook air. I still love kagi search though

I haven't had that issue, although I mostly run Orion on older systems since the support is excellent on older macOS as well. Were you using extensions?

I use both kagi and Orion, both on mobile and Mac, and I have to say that there a few bugs. On the other hand, paying for a software and a service feels good.

My only real complain with Orion is that it's not open source. I get the rationale behind, but still I don't like it.