Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.
A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.
I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.
I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.
But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.
A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing
I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.
I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.