[omnicognate]

If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all.

The alternative is to have your search paid for by someone else, in which case all the incentives are aligned towards tracking and manipulating you for their benefit and away from providing decent search results for your benefit.

The marginal cost per user for a service like this is tiny, but there's a huge fixed cost to running the whole thing. If few people use it, it will cost a lot.

I agree that it's not good for things to split into premium paid services only affordable by the well off and rubbish free services for everyone else. However the solution isn't to abandon building services like this with funding models that correctly align incentives. It's for there to be a culture change towards understanding and valuing those well aligned incentives. This will bring more users, more services, more competition and much lower costs for users.

[pelasaco]

> If more people would pay it would cost less. If everyone paid it would barely cost anything at all.

Are you assuming it or do you know for a fact? That's normally not how startups work.. as long there is an increasing paying demand for their product, I don't see why they are going to reduce their price, quite the opposite actually.

[omnicognate]

If it were culturally accepted that search is something you need to pay for then yes, I am extremely confident it would come to cost very, very little per user. A startup with a small user base may well grow the way you say, but in a mature industry providing a commodity service to most of the population, margins will be squeezed razor thin and the prices will reflect the actual cost to provide.

Note that I'm not saying this is what will happen. I replied to a comment that was more about how we should want things to turn out. I'm saying we shouldn't denounce customer-paid startups for charging what they need to succeed in traditionally ad-funded industries, even if that means they start out as premium services for those willing and able to pay. Rather, we should cheer them on and advocate for the benefits their funding model brings, in the hope that they will succeed, grow, become commoditised and benefit everyone for pennies.

The alternative is to stick with the ad-driven, dross-filled panopticon we already have.

[pelasaco]

> The alternative is to stick with the ad-driven, dross-filled panopticon we already have.

Sure, I'm all for paying for something if they don't track me, if I can use their API as I need, etc.. the only thing that wasn't clear to me was the conclusion of "more people paying, cheaper it will get" because that probably isn't the case.