Kagi is proxying to Google (through SerpApi), Bing and Yandex among others so they have actually high costs. I think the thing they're wondering above is how much it actually costs to process a search without the adversarial relationship with the search company.
Anyone [any hackers here perhaps] doing straight anonymous reselling of SerpApi Google searches, maybe $10 at a time? Like Kagi but minus most of the infra and team.
Also SerpApi results just as good as Google? Sometimes Google still beats Kagi (maybe I’m search bubbled despite light anonymity measures).
Shameless plug: I am currently building https://www.chab.ai/ .. feel free to get in touch if you want to try it out.
SerpApi is just an API to Google. Kagi does more stuff than just scraping Google via SerpApi, but they do scrape Google via SerpApi.