Everything is more expensive than deepseek. They aren't frontier in intelligence but they are the frontier in cost per intelligence

What surprised me the most was the fact that people have enough disposable income to pay for search to make this viable

Search is one of the most critical pieces of technology for most people on the web. That, combined with the point another comment made that indicates the demographic of Kagi largely revolves around IT/SWE (who generally have more disposable income than other types of jobs), shows good reason why Kagi could survive long term