It feels much less slimy to pay a nominal fee for a service than it does to use a "free" service and wonder about how / to what extent your data is being exploited.
100% agree. Free services have their place, but I'd love to have more paid service alternatives for derives that only exist as "free".
That said, all my friends think I'm insane and poke fun at me for paying for search, so I imagine we're a small minority.
People just hate paying for software in general in my experience, especially a subscription.
I have multiple good friends who refuse to pay 99 cents a month to get 50gb of iCloud storage so they can backup their phones, and instead of all their precious memories on a single device that is out and about.
It's pretty well established that people are just generally irrational about free things. Because of this, I think any business model involving giving something away for free, whether it's a loss leader or or ad supported or something else, is fundamentally anti-competetive. Cognitive biases place any competitor charging for the good/service at a disadvantage. If you're a non profit, go ahead and give things away. If you're a business, you should have to charge.
I think the whole "if it's free, you're the product" nugget of information has not been broadly understood by folks, or if it has, maybe folks don't care as much about their data.
I do live these days with the understanding that pretty much all of my personal info is out there one way or another, a social security number is about as private as a phone number these days.
I think people genuinely don't realize how invasive the data gathered is. If they knew what engineers and admins can see, they'd be floored
I like that Kagi charges for their service, so their motive is to provide services for that cost, and not with ads on top of it.