I agree with the anxiety, that's also something I hate with clouds (AWS and similar). Though for Kagi it's counting my searches, so it's not like a bot on the other side of the world will raise my bill.
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".
You can do that with Kagi, there is both a soft limit and hard limit you can set. Although we would like to go towards the future with no limits as soon as economics allow it.
The idea would be that people can set a hard limit after which Kagi would redirect everything to a fallback of their choice. If my limit is set to 10$ and I reach it by the 21st of the month, then all my searches will automatically go to e.g. DuckDuckGo until the next month.
Oh I did not know that. I have the "legacy premium" (not sure if that's the right name) left for a few months, I guess I'll see that when I transition to the newer pricing plan.
For all of those, I would like to be able to set an upper limit. Like "cut my service for the rest of the month if it costs more than X".