Why pay for a search engine

To be in the top 1% you would likely need to depend on search on a daily basis for your livelihood. As a reminder the Starter plan is USD $5/month with 300 searches included.

99% of people search less than 10 times a day with loading the next page counting as a search. That's interesting and hard to accept but might be true with many living in apps and wall gardens like facebook. I wonder what the mode number is for those 99%. 1 or 2 searches a day.

I'd assume searches for the majority might be very "bursty", and while they may indeed spend most of their time in Facebook, Tiktok etc. when planning a vacation, searching for stuff to purchase or looking up recipes to try and the like, they'd issue a number of queries to narrow down into their area of interest which would blow past your estimate of 10 queries/day.

There are also a fair number of queries that are just "Facebook", "<name of famous newspaper>" etc. which would also probably count towards some of the quota; it'd be great if some sort of caching could be implemented for these.