Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.

Quick question, how were you plnning to cover costs?

You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing service? I’m a fucking communist, please don’t make me stan capitalism.

Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.

This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.

One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too or take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it.

A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.

This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.

Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.

Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.

Youtube also didn’t have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.

Now to be clear, I don’t pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that’s more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.

“Just use chatGPT.” -IT

I’m guessing you haven’t worked for a big company before.

I have never heard of that before but, they have a really weird requirement for source release.

Source code will be made available to customers who have been paying for at least 12 months.

I don’t think I’ve heard of any software doing that before,

also I really don’t like how the “how do you know we don’t track queries” is basically “find out yourself after 12 months when we give you the source code”

Kagi is European. Not in the EU: they’re based in Serbia. But they are European.

I don't know for sure, but it seems to say "100 searches total", which is pretty lame.

If it was 100 searches a month, or even 50, then I would certainly try it. But I'm not gonna go through the process of making an account and changing my habits just to do 100 searches one time.

Are you rephrasing searches often?
Not getting what you wanted the first time?
Because that’s a ton of queries.

DDG gets to show more ads that way. It might not be you, but part of the plan to make you run more queries.

Ok sorry ignoring the rest of your comment but how do you do 2500-3500 searches a month? That’s 100 a day, and you explicitly excluded work related searching.

You’re doing a search every 10 minutes of every waking hour of every day, not including searches done for work. You barely have time to read what you are searching.

Why so many searches?

I always go well over 300. I search everything

Does this mean it’s effectively $0.0167 per search, and you have to buy batches of 300 searches, but they have an expiration date?

I definitley search a lot in that case; I tried it for a few months and I think I hit the 300 cap after three weeks each month.

tl;dr: you’re paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I’d rather be paying directly than use a “free” service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.

No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.

In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn’t scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.

Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.

Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that’s a different conversation).

I think your first sentence is a valid opinion to hold, but I disagree that they’re just as bad when they’re very upfront about what you’re paying for. Google et all meanwhile don’t make it clear that they monitize user data unless you’re paying attention

Im okay with it tbh. The everything must be free on the internet mindset is what led ads working its way in everywhere.

It costs money to maintain software?