I couldn’t find anything about your claim that conversion would cost extra, not on the pricing page and not in the FAQ section. I also did a few conversation searches and there was no info about additional price. Can you link to where it says that?

Just look at your billing page and do a few of those searches. You will see they count as a paid search - nothing special you need to look for.

I'm not saying they charge extra for them, just that they charge for them like other searches. Doing math in the address bar is so second-nature to me now, and it seems a bit silly for Kagi to charge me for working out what 2 * 8 is.

Kagi has been very transparent about the reason for the costs - it’s what they need to charge to not lose money, since they don’t sell your user data or track you.

I've seen their posts on this, but the question is how accurate that data is. 80 searches costing Kagi $1 doesn't intuitively feel reasonable, but perhaps it is the truth. Google's search API is $1 per 200 queries, and you would assume they make a profit at that pricing: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview#pricing

Of all the subscriptions I have, this one seems like the least value for money for me personally, when I can get for example 5TB of cloud storage for less cost.

It's not that I'm comparing no-search to search, it's that I'm comparing the incremental improvement from DDG to Kagi, and considering whether that improvement is worth $10 or $25 a month.