Vlad
To me, this greater cost is simply the greater cost of a minimum viable product. I don't see myself ever paying for mostly reheated normie results from Google, Bing, etc. that I can find basically anywhere, no matter how nicely they're arranged. At the moment, I am not going to pay for Kagi because its lack of ability to find this result doesn't impress me. (If it had come up with the result Yandex did and more, maybe a list of multiple threads with the image in it as surely seems to me to be possible, possibly the original 8chan (where it was actually originally posted) URL where the original post was made, then I really would have been impressed.)
If you want people to pay for something that's traditionally been free, then the results must truly be impressive and premium. You can't just not find something that a free search engine out there can. Why would I ever pay for what I can get better for free?
How you manage the costs is your business. (Users can pay more for more/expanded search engines? I don't know. It's not my business model as I probably wouldn't have made a mostly subscription-only search engine in the first place. I would let users mine cryptocurrency for me in their browser/extension/app/etc. to pay for their searches as an alternative at least. I would still have ads but just force any prospective advertisers to preemptively contractually acknowledge that their ads can appear next to essentially anything and that they'll have to deal with it.) I am not an employee of yours and know nothing about your internal operations. I just knew that this query would test your claims of comprehensiveness and wanted to give you a heads up that you failed.
I do wish you luck in your goal of honestly cataloguing the web. (And some of the results for other queries are a bit more impressive. I appreciated "ivermectin" pointing to the work of Alexandros Marinos.) It is a noble one, and I've long thought that Google and other corrupt woke Western companies in the realm needed to be replaced in regards to it for a long time... but that's exactly why you won't get anywhere by solely relying on their tech.
