I want to start by inviting everyone who are looking into this post to check the git commit linked before reading and after that read their current page, it will make more sense.
I think most people don’t understand the fact that Kagi is meta-search engine which literally collect the results of other search engines and display it and add very small amount of results from their index(tecilis).
They are starting to act shady this year(check the attached git commit to see their changes to their documentation page).
People basically pay them to search Yandex and Brave for them.
Before anyone say but privacy, they are closed source and there is a better open source meta search engines which actually respect your privacy and need your donations more than Kagi shareholders.
Open source alternative:
I tried SearXNG but the UI/UX was so shitty that I’d honestly rather pay for Kagi. Lots of people love it because it’s open source and are willing to 100% look past all UI/UX problems, which is a very common problem with open source in general.
Also, the actual quality of the results was garbage compared to Kagi.
You can change UI theme on SearchX
I know, and all the options look pretty bad IMO. That also doesn’t fix UX problems.
And I’ve found SearxNG to provide fantastic results, though I’m using it self-hosted so maybe that’s the difference? I started using it as a test about a month ago, and I’ve converted by default search engine on my machines to it because it’s delivered excellent, un-cluttered results for anything I’ve looked for on technical and non-technical searches.