Sorry about that. I deleted my previous post because I thought it was an answer to another post. But you were faster with responding to it, haha. Yes, I understand their business model now. They want you to pay for a specific amount of searches. That's how they cover the costs.
Vexz
I see! Thanks for the clarification. I just checked their prices. Looks like you get X searches for a specific price. Not appealing to me but I bet many people are fine with that. I rather prefer a little bit of ads at the top of my search results (which I could block with an adblocker anytime) but that is just my personal preference.
How exactly am I the customer if they don't track me? Do they display ads? How do they cover the costs for this search engine?
I'm not really understanding what you wanna tell me with "you are the customer". They display ads at the top of your search results and that's how they make money. Considering that, yes, you are the customer. But they don't track you and your search queries are anonymized so they respect your privacy. With an adblocker you don't even see the ads. You can make an account to earn PRE (the crypto currency they use) with your search queries. But you don't need to do that. You could even run your own node server(s) and earn even more because you're helping the search engine by being a part of the infrastructure. But you can ignore all that and just use the search engine.
Anyway I'm really satisfied with the search results. Didn't even feel the need to switch to another search engine since I've started using it a few months ago.
Why? You can completely ignore that. Just use the search engine and ignore the rest. I'm really happy with the search results.
Mmh, looks like you need an account to use this search engine. Always not a good sign in terms of privacy but I might be wrong here. I'm currently using Presearch. It's decentralized (like Lemmy) and anonymizes your search queries. Most of it is Open Source but they announced to make everything Open Source in the future.
Apple is a big tech company and no big tech company should be trusted (too much). While I think in terms of their user's privacy they are better than Google, Google at least is pretty vocal about them spying on their users with their actions.
On an iPhone you'll never get completely rid of trackers and stuff even with a jailbreaked device. Imo the best option you have (if you want a phone that respects your privacy) is an Android phone with a degoogled custom ROM that focuses on privacy. Something like Graphene OS, Calyx OS and /e/OS.
I second NextDNS. Been using it for months now too and am very happy with it. Very fast DNS servers and I love that you have so much control over (un-)blocked domains. Absolutely worth the 2€ for a month. Especially with NX Enhanced it's even more convenient.
Yes, I have a self hosted instance of Vaultwarden and I'm very happy with it.
Why don't you use a sync tool to automatically sync your KeePass database when you're home and just get rid of Bitwarden?
Edit: Or just use Syncthing to always keep your database on all devices in sync. You wouldn't even need to open ports.
It's fine but I wouldn't judge if I had never tested it for a while. But whether you wanna give that search engine a chance or not is completely up to you ofc. :)
If you wanna know how it respects its user's privacy you need to do some research as it's a little complex. I don't see where you get scammed just by using the search engine. It's like you're saying you got scammed by a car seller once so you'll never make any other attempt to buy a car ever again.
In the meantime I got to understand why Kagi needs an account: It's their business model. You have to pay to make searches that exceed the free 100 searches. So of course you need an account.