Kagi boasts about not spending money on marketing and I think that's a little bit of PR bs, a little strategic, and a little because they probably don't have a ton of money for it.

Strategically, it let's them grow more organically, through word of mouth, and probably in a more long-term sustainable way.

I just started paying for it and I am so amazed at the quality of search results. I haven't done a ton of A/B testing versus Google or bing but I've noticed that it's a cleaner interace and I get to results way faster. I'm genuinely shocked too, because ecosia or duckduckgo always had me going back to Google to actually get the answer I needed 50%+ of the time. Those other searches just had shitty results. Kagi hasnt let me down at all. The results are either on par or vastly superior to Google.

I will say that I more apt to check more results before I refine the search terms because they technically "cost". Which is hilarious because I do the 300 search tier and I doubt I'd hit it. And if I did it's literally a penny for additional searches. Just thought that was an interesting observation I made about my search habits.