Thank you for bringing up Kagi, I had never heard of it before. An intriguing idea for sure and I am not averse to paying for searches, but as a serial Google-fu practitioner $10/month for 1000 searches (1.5c per search after) seems quite steep to me. Some days I swear that would last me 24 hours at most. I need to start tracking that I think.
I do however applaud the seeming transparency on their website. It may or may not be for me, but if they really plan to operate how they lay out on their website, it truly is a breath of fresh air and I wish them luck.
I thought I make a ton of searches too (and yeah apparently I do vs normal internet user) but when I tracked my usage it turned out to be around 30-40 searches / day. So, it's not that bad. ATM I still have Ecosia as the default search engine and when it fails to turn up good results I rerun the search with Kagi (which is indeed quite a bit better). So far I seem to use Kagi like 1-3 times a day so it's not that bad.
I've been using Kagi for ~6-9 months, as a developer. Gives satisfying results and I never feel the need to go back to Google. When I was using DDG, I always went back too Google to get better results.