Google isn’t what it used to be, but the free alternatives like DuckDuckGo aren’t really that great. Given how vital a good search engine has been to make any use of the internet since the late 90s, I think it’s not unreasonable to offer quality search at a reasonable price.
I’m not aware of any paid-for search engines, and I’m not sure what they could charge for without seeming greedy. Perhaps have a free tier that limits you to so many searches per day and a paid tier with unlimited searches and another with API access or something. The key would be to have a good-better-best system that makes everyone feel they’re getting a reasonable product for what they’re paying while keeping the experience serviceable for free riders.
Email is similar. While it’s not too hard to set up a bare SMTP server, a bare SMTP server will get you absolutely nowhere because every reputable email service will flag it as spam. The hard part is making the server pass all the sniff tests that other services use. You also cannot self-host because residential ISPs block port 25, again as a spam prevention mechanism.
I pay for Proton, not because I trust them per se, indeed the more a company trumpets about how secure and anonymous they are the more suspicious I get. But I trust them more than I trust Google and that’s what matters.
No I wouldn’t.
E-Mail is an essential tool and so is using a search engine. When ProtonMail was offering a subscription just so I can have multiple folders, that turned me off.
I hate that what is deemed essential, is turned into a monetizing scheme. God forbid those of us lived in a time where search engines were useful and e-mail was perfected. Now we’re in the era of monetizing everything so those two features have been enshittified.
a time where search engines were useful and e-mail was perfected
And YouTube was friendlier! Google was losing money on all that in order to corner the market. Now they want paid back. Kinda like reddit losing money every quarter for 19-years. They just turned a profit for the first time.
We got a lot of free shit, got used it, and are now bitching about paying, or watching ads. Ultimately, enshittification was always in the cards. Not sure how we get around that without paying for microservices, kinda like OP is asking about.
I use Purelymail for Email, just because it was the cheapest and easiest solution to use my own domain without having to host anything myself. I don’t think any other Email service will beat their 10$ per year price.
For search engine, I have tried Kagi but just didn’t see the point. My DDG searches are perfectly fine and I still find everything I need with relative ease. Although I’ve been actually needing the search engine much less recently as I’ve embraced just reading the official documentation for things I program with haha
I pay for proton to get both email and VPN. Search really doesn’t matter that much to me anymore. I’ve learned to just live with the annoying aspects of duck duck go, and I use it infrequently enough that i don’t think I’d ever be willing to pay for it.
I pay for email. Proton Unlimited atm which includes email, cloud, vpn, password and email aliases. They offer more but that’s all I use. Their Linux support is crap so I may move to other services.
For search, I using Startpage. Seems to give me the results I want. Once in a while I change to Brave, Qwant, or DDG.
Kagi and Tuta. OP is drunk.
My dream IEP would provide secure search, email, calendar, office suite and cloud services. I would pay just one provider for all services combined. I would gladly double my monthly subscription for such a service, with 2 accounts at 50go each
As long as it’s fairly priced with proper privacy, definitely.
kagi.com is a paid search engine like you describe.
I use kagi. Better search results than Google. No bullshit. Love it.
Nope.
I pay for posteo for email and use Qwant for searches.
£12-ish a year on mailbox.org
I made the switch about 6 months ago and I’m very happy with them
I paid for an email service to step back from google and the services were so disappointing after a couple years and never improved that i couldn’t justify the admittedly low cost and went back to freemails.
The fuck do you get for paid email? It’s literally just SMTP/POP — where’s the “value add”? I use my own email client so the bullshit ads from Google aren’t an issue, but am I missing out on some email 2.0 magic??
Like I said in the OP, you can set up an SMTP server pretty easily with basic technical knowledge but all those folks saying spinning up your own email is easy never tell you that having USABLE email is a lot more than a bare SMTP server. And again, you can’t self host on most residential ISPs so you have to add getting a VPS up and running and secure.
It’s literally just SMTP/POP — where’s the “value add”?
I’d say to the majority of people, that first part reads like nonsense.
The value add is thus “you don’t have to learn computer stuff.”
The person you’re responding to has clearly never been in charge of hosting a mail server. That shit is absolutely not worth it.
Free email sounds good until you realize you’re paying for it by letting them peruse your mail to scrape out ad data and feed their LLMs.
I’m pretty happy to pay a small fee to avoid both of the above.
Free proton for email, paid Kagi for search.
Fastmail is so insanely good it’s crazy how bad Gmail got
For email, yes. For search, not until the subscription engines like Kagi go open source (maybe Kagi are and I just missed it but I can’t see a link to a repo on their website).
I have no objections to paying for a service but I am long past just trusting software. As for kagi in particular, $10 (plus tax) per month for unlimited search is a ridiculous price.
