Browser is the most intimate piece of software we have on our computer. Paying for it (vs someone else paying for your browsing) is a no brainer.
From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.
Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.
With ~200M Firefox users and Google paying ~$400M annually, a $5/month subscription from just 7% of users would fully replace that search deal revenue.
One of the core problems of the internet is that the "everything-is-free-if-watch-ads-but-you-can-also-easily-block-them" paradigm of the last 25 years has created a generation of people with an innate entitlement to free services.
Asking these people to directly cover the cost of the services they use incurs a level of incredulity and anger on par with charging to breath.
Like OP, I think now that we see enshittifcation happening all over the place, there is also a growing market of people who are willing to pay for something of high quality that won't be enshittified. Kagi is actually good example: who would've paid for a search engine 10 years ago?
Personally, I try more than ever to give my money to privately owned non-vc funded companies or open-source projects. I avoid big publicly traded tech companies as much as possible, because I've lived to see how modern business models + the constant need for growth plays out, and I'm done with it.
The problem is that people like yourself don't even register on the radar.
Nebula for example is the choice answer to the enshitification of YouTube. Lots of the top creators push it to billions of viewers. Pretty much everyone who does the YouTube rounds knows about it.
Yet they only have ~750,000 subscriptions.
That is an awful conversion rate, and why these creators will be stuck making ad supported yt content for the foreseeable future. People overwhelming do not want to pay directly.
I think people like me do register on the radar, see platforms like substack, kagi, bandcamp or patreon to mention a few. Linux is more popular than ever and keeps slowly growing.
It won't happen overnight, but there are now viable businesses out there with non-ad business models. Yes they're not as large as Google, but I don't think they need to be either.
Unfortunately, Kagi works with Russian companies and pays them money, which in my book is a no-no. I do not want any of my money to contribute to the Russian economy in any way, because I know what is happening to people in Ukraine.
(I was a Kagi subscriber, no more, because of this)
I pay for Kagi. I generally find it to be adequate at the moment --- not wonderful, but better than other options available. And unlike other options, Kagi is improving slowly over time.
That said, your point about the incentives is spot on. It is the primary reason that I pay for Kagi: they have the incentive to deliver good results and even improve. They even talk about this on their website [1].
From day one Orion browser [1] has been designed with this business model in mind.
Napkin math also shows that if only 5% Firefox users decided to pay for it, Mozilla would not only replace Google search deal revenue but also align incentives with its users, leading to a better product down the road.
[1] https://kagi.com/orion