I pay $5 a month to host my own instance of SearXNG on a 1GB Linode server. I am in full control of the server and the source code running it since it’s completely open software. I don’t have to trust that Kagi is being honest and fear that one day it comes out that they did something stupid like leak my billing address or sell my data through some convoluted legalese change to their terms of service.

Additionally I get access to search results from Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo, and any other provider I want, all without having anything about me or my activity tied to some kind of centralized identity/payment.