Last night at a social outing I had to explain to a project manager who is supposedly an AI expert that the side project I run as a community resource can't be entirely free because it costs me non-trivial amounts of money due to its success. She was unaware that things like bandwidth, or email, or compute could cost anything. She even asked me what compute is. She even started with "I mean, I know you pay for the domain, but... What else?".

Even people working close to us seem to have no conception of the economics of the web. Kagi is, practically speaking, an activist's service. Most people only respond to direct incentives. It's how we got to where we are now. I would expect this uphill battle almost naturally at this point.