I think you’re objections are fair and real so I won’t dismiss them

The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go

You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying

As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription

If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google

DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc

It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you

Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect