Reality is, money needs to come from somewhere.

That’s not reality, that’s a mindset promoted by corporations for the last decade. How much do you pay for using Lemmy, Linux, Mastodon and other FOSS?

I see all your points and fully get it. I just naively wish something new will pop up by popular demand, some breakthrough idea out of the box, like some kind of open source search engine supported by p2p network or federated instances where everyone would contribute resources. If such demanding projects like operating system or social media can be open source then I don’t see why search engine couldn’t be.

As soon as I start thinking about what Kagi offers, there are the following cons popping into my head:

• I shouldn’t need to pay for search
• I shouldn’t need to pay that much
• I don’t even want to be logged in in order to search
• how does incognito search work if you need to be logged in?

I’ll be watching their career with great interest, but I think I’ll wait for something different.