[Terretta]

I don't buy that. I think it's the first order "free vs. paid", not the limits.

I can't picture anyone willing to spend any money for better search quality consciously adjusting their personal search behavior because of the price difference in Kagi tiers per number of searches.

In other words, these quantity limits don't change behavior, other than abusive/exploitative behavior (e.g. account sharing, bots, etc.).

Instead, I would guess just the "free vs. fee" discriminator cuts enough users it enables not having to serve an infinitely long tail of freeloaders with a lowest common denominator SERP.

[jeromegamez]

Since I'm using Kagi Search, my search behavior indeed has changed - not because I adjusted it but because the search results have been consistently better than with other engines, leading to fewer searches.