It's weird in that most users would value it at $3.99 a month, but the average user also scrolls for several hours a month, with each one of those hours packed with ads.
This equates to way more than $4 in revenue a month.
Visa takes a cut from transaction, only a portion of that goes to the bank. I get 2.5% cash back on my transactions, but Visa only charges a 2.24% transaction fee. There must be more to cash back than the transaction fee.
It's $.0125, so 1.25 cents not double digits like I thought. They also average 27 searches per day per user. So an average of 821.25 searches per user per month, meaning a cost of $10.27 per month.
The best options would be an open source, donation supported search engine, but the money required to host/develop that is immense.
We are all freeloading off of Lemmy right now, unless you are donating to the people who are running the servers. The cost to run a search engine is much higher though -- kagi pays (iirc) double digit cents for each search, even before development costs, with the average user doing 700 searches a month. The costs are way higher.
I had a 2023 Elantra, and iirc it had these features for $30 a year after my subscription ended.
These prices are way higher. Seems like every company agreed that subscription = $10(ish) a month, regardless of the actual cost the features justify.