I generally agree with your sentiment against trusting free services/things.

I agree with paying for Kagi.

But I can see why people try to be frugal with their money and use free services.

The problem is handing over money guarantees nothing.

Money provides the opportunity for the other party to do the right thing by you. But they may take your money and do the shitty thing anyway. Particularly when you have no real way to tell - like most people using the internet.

But re: kagi specifically, for me personally, the delta is obvious and isn't trust based.

When I use Kagi I have a curated search experience that has a relatively high information density - driven in large part by the alignment of incentives and the ability for me to tune my results.

There is a noticeable difference for me when I switch to 'free' alternatives where the content thrown in front of me is mining for attention and CPM - because the cost of 'free' is covered by the value of my attention. The cost of kagi is less than the value of my attention.