[luke5441]

How can this be true? Should I not worry about margin compression at Google due to heavy cap-ex requirements anymore? Is this temporary because Kagi got a good deal for tokens? Are they paying through their noses for the Google search API calls? I don't get it.

[techjamie]

Because they pay API costs to send the search to SerpApi. I forget exactly what the cost was for them per-search and I'm having little luck finding it, but I know they've published that cost before and I know it's more than a whole cent. By comparison, running a good but not top-tier model to answer the same question might run a small fraction of a cent. Cheaper than a follow up query by the user.