Unfortunately search is prohibitly expensive! This is however still much cheaper than Kagi's or Bing's search API.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html

For the free tier, Brave is 1tps capped at 2000/month. Bing is 3tps capped at 1000/month. Kagi is 100 searches total.

Not sure what you mean by "quite" expensive? If you are comparing to other services like Google, then of course Google's privacy cost is many orders of magnitude greater than free.

Developing an independent search infrastructure takes considerable resources, so these prices are not necessarily expensive. We can confirm this, as Mojeek crawls, indexes and ranks independently of any other search engine. We also have an API and have been providing search without tracking for over 16 years.