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Yeah, I had been wanting a good paid search engine for ages since I didn’t like being google’s product or watching as their search got worse for my use cases over time. I pay for Kagi now and it’s really worth it for me, specially considering customizations you can add to improve the experience.

I did use GSuite for my own email/cloud storage setup though have since moved to other providers to try to mitigate risk, eg if Google doesn’t like me for literally any reason, they could disable my account and I’d lose access to mail, files, etc.

I’ll often pay for products I use a lot even though I don’t get that much value out, eg Discord/Reddit, though those two companies seem to recently have changed course somewhat so I’ve stopped paying for them. It was mostly to support a product I cared about.

A lot of people aren’t fortunate enough to be able to pay for stuff, which I was once not, and realize that it’s not always so simple of a problem.

In this case, though, if you have access to the Internet and a semi-okay device, you can achieve a lot

If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads. So you’ll get a very tiny percentage of people paying for a service where you hope you’ll recoup your investments after some years. Maybe never.

> If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it?

But bnce the code is written to handle it then it's there for everyone to use (though yes, billing infrastructure does requires continual upkeep) - it could even be an internal garage/passion-project/hackathon thing. Companies like Twitter want to attact "the best", and people like that will want to build products that they themselves want to use - why stop them?

Plus there might be other intangible benefits to supporting power-users: it means the power-users will talk about how great something is, and you can't buy word-of-mouth influence like that.

> Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads.

People said the same thing about paying-for-YouTube, and yet YouTube Premium is here to stay, and I'm glad that Google was willing to experiment with the concept, and it worked - but what about all the companies that aren't willing to at-least try to find out?

There is no such thing as “once the code has been written”.

A passion project is great until the passionate project flounder moves on, then it’s unmaintainable junk.

A passion-project that’s been productized just becomes a regular software project to anyone else besides the original creator - no-one is suggesting we take garage-projects and ship-it immediately.

It’s kinda like how Microsoft handled easter-eggs in the 1990s (before they were banned completely around ~2003), where the egg is just another engineering feature-project, with a spec-doc, a dev timeline, a test plan, and accountability - even if the end-feature is designed to be hidden.

You really can’t apply that to a payment feature. Unfortunately everything that touches money needs constant attention, even if you “just use Stripe”.

And yet many of these sites put enormous effort into combating ad blockers. So clearly the fact that users don’t want ads is fairly significant to them.

Users who don’t want ads aren’t exactly the same as users who are willing to pay. Prime example — myself. What I’m getting at, companies have calculated that in most of scenarios having paid model isn’t worth it. There will always be exceptions for services that people use a lot — Spotify, Netflix, Youtube and etc. For websites where you go on for a few minutes, people aren’t willing to pay up.

> There's also the worst-of-both-worlds: when you pay for something, and it still comes with ads, and introduces user-hostile changes to the UX - or otherwise leaves you with the feeling that you aren't valued as a customer (e.g. Windows 11, Reddit, post-Elon Twitter, etc).

And the Peacock streaming service.

The best part about that is that they lose money and customers and possibly gain zealous competitors because of it. Customer profit incentives far outweigh as revenue incentives