I love Kagi, used my free searches and customized the crap out of it. It would absolutely be worth the cost if I wasn't penny pinching because of cost of living increases and inflation.
I've been lately using FOSS metager.org as my main search engine and it has decent results. Often a lot better than google, especially with quoted words and 'site:' specifiers which it never ignores.
It also has domain blacklist similar to kagi.
This looks nice and the payment model is more convenient (on demand). Haven't heard of this before. From the first use, it looks like a search aggregator as it takes results from many engines. Each source engine costs differently.
Oh well, back to bing with GPT4 chat/search.