For me, it’s not only the price you pay. Having a username attached to each your searches is the opposite of privacy, no matter how much you trust their legalese wording
I go the opposite way. I trust a company that takes my money to pay its costs to keep my privacy. As opposed to a company who "doesn't know who I am". (Apart from unique fingerprint https://amiunique.org/ over many queries over many months)
They try to. But every time a browser gets better at existing methods, it also gains new features which become new methods of identification. The web browser environment is broken. And if you get to fight it by using something with better protection, you're only exposing yourself more because no other users do the same thing.
99% of people are probably signed into a google account when they search google. If you want the sort of privacy you seem to want, stick to the dark web and similarly inconvenient tools.
To maintain your level of privacy requires a drastically different lifestyle than most of us have or want.
They didn't state anything about their desired level of privacy other than not wanting a username attached to every search. That's not equivalent to needing to use TOR for every search.
>99% of people are probably signed into a google account when they search google
What is the relevance of this statement? Obviously this wouldn't apply to the parent poster, it doesn't refute anything the parent said, and at least anecdotally it's not true at all.
>If you want the sort of privacy you seem to want, stick to the dark web and similarly inconvenient tools.
Privacy is a spectrum, not some binary choice between having a username (and often real name) attached to every search vs. using the dark web for every search. You can land somewhere in the middle, for example: "I don't want a username attached to every search".
There is no technical reason Kagi needs usernames, but they choose to require them. For some people, that points to the company not being as privacy-friendly as other people seem to think/claim.
I dont browse signed in to my Google account, which I barely use. But Google has an open account on each of us, even if we block their servers at the firewall level
Oh well I don't assume I'm in anyway "anonymous" no matter if I got a username/ipadress/cookie/deep-state-monitoring attached to my searches. Things I html-POST to the web is no longer private.