But the problem is that this is what it costs for a search that doesn’t sell your data or advertise to you. Search is expensive.
Fortunately you do get into the habit of just searching sites directly, like wikipedia, MDN, archwiki, etc., rather than using up your general purpose searches.
It’s this, or sell your data to Google for free searches.
And maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just not sustainable for searched to be paid, but Kagi is really transparent about their pricing. It’s just expensive unless it’s subsidized by ads or data collection.
I pay them to not get ads and not sell my data (and for higher quality searches than DDG) – you know how they say if you’re not paying, you’re the product?
Given that search actually costs X, once you’re cogniziant of it, you have to decide whether or not you want to pay X for a search, or find alternatives.