Technology

Can anyone here convince me it's worth the price?

Depends on what you want from them and your financial situation.

For me, yeah, it is. I want to pay a service fee and not deal with ads or someone logging, profiling, and trying to figure out how to monetize my searches. For me, the $10/mo for unlimited searches tier is what I want. I'm principally concerned about privacy.

I don't really take much advantage of most of the extra stuff they do other than the Threadiverse (they call it "Fediverse Forums") search lens and sometimes their Usenet search engine. Maybe this effort to suppress AI-generated spam websites will be nice, but have to see what happens, as I expect that the SEO crowd creating spam websites will also aim to adapt if it becomes sufficiently impactful to their bottom line.

If one of their extra features particularly fits your use case (say, the ability to fiddle with website priorities or blacklist or pin them in your search results) that might be valuable to you, but I can't speak as to that. I've seen people on here say that they really like that, but I don't use that functionality. Or the ability to easily download images in results from their image search if you're on mobile and are hitting something like pinterest, which is obnoxious on Google Images. Search bangs. Depends on what features you use and what each is worth to you.