I've been using paid email (fastmail) for quite a long time and it's fine, I use it dozens or hundreds of times a day and it's around $4 a month. Kagi is $10 a month and I'd use it a handful of times a week (based on trying their free 100 queries) if subscribed. Otherwise Duckduckgo suffices. I'm satisfied with duckduckgo in a way that I could never be with any "free" email service since DDG doesn't require a signup and doesn't supply long term storage.
I use web search quite a lot, but most of the time DDG works fine for me. A handful of times per week, I'm unsatisfied with the DDG results for some particular query where I think Kagi might be better. So I'd check Kagi on those occasions if I had access. But meh, I don't need it that much.
