I'd be willing to pay up to 3$ a month for my searches, but also per-use.
If I make 0 searches, why do I need to pay?
A replacement for Google that is to survive should really convince and be super cheap, it's so easy to ignore sponsored search results (for now).
The market for most is met with ads. It's why streaming services are adding ad tiers and JCPenney doing "away with constant sales and coupons, opting instead for everyday low prices" failed [1]. That's most consumers. It's almost all non-premium consumers. That's good fodder for Google and whatever LLM garbage replaces them.
Paraphrasing Scott Galloway, advertising is a tax on the stupid and the poor. I wish something like Kagi got public funding. But we have better priorities than taking ads out of search. So for the time being, you get one product for the wealthy and savvy and another, that's just good enough, for everyone else.
[1] https://excelsiorcapital.substack.com/p/jc-penneys-lost-barg...