First time I've heard of them. I like the concept but 5$ a month for only 300 search makes me think that you'd still need another search engine on the side, or pay for the more expensive plan.

I'm not worried about Kagi's privacy, the only thing you need to give them is an email address (which is kind of a no-brainer if they need to contact you).

You can pay with Bitcoin if you want more privacy.

And they don't even allow you to store your own search history, because they don't want to save it anywhere.

"Save My Search History Currently this option can not be turned on. Kagi does not save any searches by default. In the future we may add features that will utilize your search history and then we will allow you to enable this."

It's either money or your data. I prefer to pay with money. If enough people do, the price might lower (hopeium) or the competition might increase for the same service, creating better or cheaper services in the same space.

I thought I'd burn through them but I haven't had an issue. I use DDG for low hanging fruit but I'm going to stop bothering.

I'm at 243 searches now and it resets in 8 days. Seems to be enough for me.

I do use bangs quite a bit, so if I need to find a movie I go !imdb the matrix and if I'm looking for a book I can go !gr rando splicer which saves on search credits.

Depends. I use search engines a lot as a programmer. I have over 600 so far. But the results have been good. I'm willing to pay for that.

And you can easily block or boost sites in the search results: I've got all pinterest domains blocked, along with a bunch of "news" outlets that don't actually produce anything good in the world.

Similarly I have stuff like reddit, hackernews etc boosted in the results if they match.

I did the free trial for a while and only used Kagi for a while, still going strong with the $5 300 searches per month tier. I don't really need to search that much because the results are usually correct the first time :)