As long as it's fairly priced with proper privacy, definitely.
kagi.com is a paid search engine like you describe.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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I use kagi. Better search results than Google. No bullshit. Love it.
I pay for Kagi Search, it’s awesome. It’s got a ton of useful features you’d never see in advertising-based search engines, like the ability to up and down rank sites.
Yes. I pay for Proton for mail and Kagi for search.
Email yes but only with my own domain so I can change providers if the price changes.
I wouldn't pay for anything I'd prefer to keep anonymous and that includes search.
How is your email not flagged as spam? Last time I ran my own email/domain, I could hardly deliver anything. Been 10-years though and I've learned more about best practices. Can it be done now?
Running your own SMTP is still going to be tough. But you can use a mail provider that lets you use your own domain, then you can use their SMTP which should not get flagged as easily.
I haven't done it myself but know people who do. If you use a known provider and only the domain is yours I wouldn't expect it to be blocked as companies also use their own domain for their email.
For email, yes. For search, not until the subscription engines like Kagi go open source (maybe Kagi are and I just missed it but I can't see a link to a repo on their website).
I have no objections to paying for a service but I am long past just trusting software. As for kagi in particular, $10 (plus tax) per month for unlimited search is a ridiculous price.
Free proton for email, paid Kagi for search.
Kagi and Tuta. OP is drunk.
Yep. I switched to Kagi a bit over a year ago, which is paid search. And I pay for my email through Migadu; I thought about hosting it myself but honestly it seemed like more potential hassle than I wanted to deal with.
Fastmail is so insanely good it’s crazy how bad Gmail got
Can you have a good search engine anymore? You can get rid of ads but now the fact SEO marketing killed internet searches.
I hadn't thought of SEO as a contributing factor to the decline of the search experience, but it absolutely makes sense. To some degree I think SEO is actually GEO (Google's Engine Optimization) but if some other platform, even a paid one that isn't incentivized to weigh sponsored content higher, became dominant SEO would just pivot to minmaxing for that platform instead.
Incidentally, there's a search engine called wiby.org that only indexes sites that don't use Javascript, which in practice makes it a great web 1.0 search engine.
I was in the webmaster role for a website from the early start of the internet - SEO started off as simple ways to help improve index placement by giving different methods to the web creators to aid in better categorization of content. It quickly became an arms race of how to best game the system, and the system kept changing as well because the old SEO basics like keyword and content arrangement wasn't enough. There was one search engine I participated in (I can't recall now which one) that did the pay for clicks, and you'd literally have to pump money in the online app to try and stay above your keyword competitors, all in real time. It got stupid. And I got frustrated with it, as I felt the original goal to find the best website for a particular search had been long lost and now it was all about mechanisms to profit from everyone trying to make that first page hit. The "best" sites that couldn't play this game were lost.
Google became the dominant player by buying up other databases and engines, but even with this gaming they used to be able to produce results if you knew how to phrase searches beyond just a few words. It's almost like the whole AI prompting, what you put in makes a difference. But they eventually changed things and started getting worse results, lots of duplication, and then added AI which ruined anything they still had of quality.
I miss Hotbot. That was my go-to long ago, and it was so good. It became part of Google eventually.
What do you mean "if"? At this point anything works better than google. Specially those that cost money.
I pay for proton mail, but selfhost my own meta-search engine. Its not as pure as as one that crawls the web on its own, but the ones that do aren't developed enough for everyday use in my opinion.
No. There's no guarantee they won't get greedy and start selling my data anyway. They'd have to have a really good pitch and some way to back it up that would get me to pay. I yet know what it is, but I haven't seen it yet.
I use Purelymail for Email, just because it was the cheapest and easiest solution to use my own domain without having to host anything myself. I don't think any other Email service will beat their 10$ per year price.
For search engine, I have tried Kagi but just didn't see the point. My DDG searches are perfectly fine and I still find everything I need with relative ease. Although I've been actually needing the search engine much less recently as I've embraced just reading the official documentation for things I program with haha
Not doing it for search engines currently, but I am absolutely doing it for a VPN ( Proton ) for the bonus of having better drive and email attached.
I will agree with you on trusting Proton more than google and how suspicious Proton can seem.
I selfhost mail and pay for search, though I use the API of the paid service in my searxng.
I pay for email (Posteo) and selfhost SearXNG, so more or less yes.
I pay for proton to get both email and VPN. Search really doesn't matter that much to me anymore. I've learned to just live with the annoying aspects of duck duck go, and I use it infrequently enough that i don't think I'd ever be willing to pay for it.
I pay for posteo for email and use Qwant for searches.
I pay for email. Proton Unlimited atm which includes email, cloud, vpn, password and email aliases. They offer more but that's all I use. Their Linux support is crap so I may move to other services.
For search, I using Startpage. Seems to give me the results I want. Once in a while I change to Brave, Qwant, or DDG.
£12-ish a year on mailbox.org
I made the switch about 6 months ago and I'm very happy with them
If I had the money, then sure. I am currently barely keeping my apartment and pantry stocked tho, so I would not take this option unless it was dirt cheap
For search engine: I'm self hosting SearXNG so I'm already indirectly paying via domain registry/VPS? So yes. Technically this can be done for free though (local docker, random RasPi laying around, ...)
For email: paid (mailbox.org), worth it. Selfhosting email was too much of a headache at least for me
No
No I wouldn't.
E-Mail is an essential tool and so is using a search engine. When ProtonMail was offering a subscription just so I can have multiple folders, that turned me off.
I hate that what is deemed essential, is turned into a monetizing scheme. God forbid those of us lived in a time where search engines were useful and e-mail was perfected. Now we're in the era of monetizing everything so those two features have been enshittified.
If it's free, you are the product. How do you expect someone to offer you services for free?
Linux is free, for a trivial counter example.
Linux isn't a service though. And it's getting funding.
a time where search engines were useful and e-mail was perfected
And YouTube was friendlier! Google was losing money on all that in order to corner the market. Now they want paid back. Kinda like reddit losing money every quarter for 19-years. They just turned a profit for the first time.
We got a lot of free shit, got used it, and are now bitching about paying, or watching ads. Ultimately, enshittification was always in the cards. Not sure how we get around that without paying for microservices, kinda like OP is asking about.
I paid for an email service to step back from google and the services were so disappointing after a couple years and never improved that i couldn't justify the admittedly low cost and went back to freemails.
My dream IEP would provide secure search, email, calendar, office suite and cloud services. I would pay just one provider for all services combined. I would gladly double my monthly subscription for such a service, with 2 accounts at 50go each
The fuck do you get for paid email? It’s literally just SMTP/POP — where’s the “value add”? I use my own email client so the bullshit ads from Google aren’t an issue, but am I missing out on some email 2.0 magic??
It’s literally just SMTP/POP — where’s the “value add”?
I'd say to the majority of people, that first part reads like nonsense.
The value add is thus "you don't have to learn computer stuff."
The person you’re responding to has clearly never been in charge of hosting a mail server. That shit is absolutely not worth it.
Free email sounds good until you realize you’re paying for it by letting them peruse your mail to scrape out ad data and feed their LLMs.
I’m pretty happy to pay a small fee to avoid both of the above.
Nope.