I pay for Kagi primarily for this reason.

I think I get more than $10/month of value out of search engines, and I would rather give money to a company instead of them selling all my data and/or spamming me with a bunch of advertisements. If I am paying for something, then almost by definition the company has a means of making revenue that doesn't require ads.

I hate self-promotion but I wrote about this a bit ago [1], but the TL;DR is that I think people are actually more willing to pay for things if they actually like those things. Something Awful has fallen out of favor now, but for awhile people were happy enough to buy an account because Something Awful was fun to be on [2], and a one-time $10 fee wasn't enough to "exclude" anyone, but it did become a way to support the site in the process. I don't think this model was or is broken, I think SA fell out of fashion because Lowtax stopped caring after a certain point.

Kagi has been growing; I don't know if it's profitable yet, but it has been steadily growing an audience and regardless of your opinion on this specific service, I think this indicates that people will pay for things. At least some of us will.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...

[2] It actually still is! I bought a new account about a year ago and I had forgotten how funny a lot of the posters actually are. It's a blast.