Just to provide a bit of additional feedback, I am not a current Kagi user but was interested in starting to pay for search rather than using free ones who don't have my best interest at heart. I am ultimately deciding not to sign-up for Kagi due to the lack of utility billed option. I have a strong dislike for subscriptions, especially for things that are very obviously utilities with high usage variance between users and potentially high variance for a given user.
I would be quite happy to pay full price to cover costs, including those calculated in this thread which includes payment provider fees, company margin, OpEx per search, etc. I also would generally not have a problem paying for big blocks in advance, though if this could be made trustless (e.g., crypto-currency payment channels) then I would likely do bigger blocks at a time to minimize my transaction costs.
5000 searches for $100 mentioned in the thread above seems reasonable to me, especially if I can pay with crypto-currency (sounds like that is already a payment option).
I understand your reasoning, that either you need to force all of your light users to subsidize your heavy users, or you offer utility billing for everyone and lose users who feel anxiety at searching if they are being charged for it.
I wonder why people don't get anxiety over using electricity or water? These are both utility billed in most of the world and people seem to have adapted just fine. What is it about searching that makes it so difficult for people to deal with?
