I love it too, and I do think it's expensive, too.
A lot of people laugh at thinking $10 (USD) pm is expensive, of course it's not huge money for most people. The problem is Kagi is a kind of "vote" towards moving the internet away from the ad-supported crapware trying to spy on your every click and capture your attention non-stop. If you're trying to replace a lot of free services with paid services to cast said vote towards shaping the web into what it should be, these costs really add up.
After paying for search, email, supporting a creator or two (e.g. a podcast), and some software here or there, you can easily end up in the hundreds of dollars, then you look back and notice that at best you've saved yourself from a few annoying ads and maybe gotten a fractionally better service and at worst your experience is unchanged and you're just deriving some intangible satisfaction from having not been spied on (which at the individual level doesn't make much difference unless millions of people follow your lead) or supporting a creator you admire.
For my company, it's easy: I pay for the tooling my devs need. Overly simplified, I only pay 50-65 % of that, because expenses lower taxes. And compared to salaries, a few hundred $ is not a big deal. If I think about the time it saves us and how much money we can make in that time, it's a no brainer. Even just having people enjoy their work more pays off.
There's opportunity cost. Ad supported services are not overly incentivised to provide a quality product in the long run, so it's a safe assumption to make that they will waste your time to some degree, at least as they mature and enshittify. Some are great, eventually they all become bad, in my experience. It can be smart to use free stuff while it's still good, with an eye on migrating.
I don't know how much sense it makes to apply this opportunity cost thinking to your personal time. I don't really do that, but I do try to reduce time spent on anything that annoys me, and to do more stuff that brings me joy or pride, even if it's not economical. Life is short.
A lot of people laugh at thinking $10 (USD) pm is expensive, of course it's not huge money for most people. The problem is Kagi is a kind of "vote" towards moving the internet away from the ad-supported crapware trying to spy on your every click and capture your attention non-stop. If you're trying to replace a lot of free services with paid services to cast said vote towards shaping the web into what it should be, these costs really add up.
After paying for search, email, supporting a creator or two (e.g. a podcast), and some software here or there, you can easily end up in the hundreds of dollars, then you look back and notice that at best you've saved yourself from a few annoying ads and maybe gotten a fractionally better service and at worst your experience is unchanged and you're just deriving some intangible satisfaction from having not been spied on (which at the individual level doesn't make much difference unless millions of people follow your lead) or supporting a creator you admire.
It's tough.