As long as it's fairly priced with proper privacy, definitely.

kagi.com is a paid search engine like you describe.

I pay for Kagi Search, it’s awesome. It’s got a ton of useful features you’d never see in advertising-based search engines, like the ability to up and down rank sites.

Yes. I pay for Proton for mail and Kagi for search.

Email yes but only with my own domain so I can change providers if the price changes.

I wouldn't pay for anything I'd prefer to keep anonymous and that includes search.

Free proton for email, paid Kagi for search.

Kagi and Tuta. OP is drunk.

Yep. I switched to Kagi a bit over a year ago, which is paid search. And I pay for my email through Migadu; I thought about hosting it myself but honestly it seemed like more potential hassle than I wanted to deal with.

Fastmail is so insanely good it’s crazy how bad Gmail got

I pay for Posteo and Metager, i would never want to go back to Goole...

What do you mean "if"? At this point anything works better than google. Specially those that cost money.

For email, yes. For search, not until the subscription engines like Kagi go open source (maybe Kagi are and I just missed it but I can't see a link to a repo on their website).

I have no objections to paying for a service but I am long past just trusting software. As for kagi in particular, $10 (plus tax) per month for unlimited search is a ridiculous price.

I pay for proton mail, but selfhost my own meta-search engine. Its not as pure as as one that crawls the web on its own, but the ones that do aren't developed enough for everyday use in my opinion.

£12-ish a year on mailbox.org

I made the switch about 6 months ago and I'm very happy with them

I use Purelymail for Email, just because it was the cheapest and easiest solution to use my own domain without having to host anything myself. I don't think any other Email service will beat their 10$ per year price.

For search engine, I have tried Kagi but just didn't see the point. My DDG searches are perfectly fine and I still find everything I need with relative ease. Although I've been actually needing the search engine much less recently as I've embraced just reading the official documentation for things I program with haha

Not doing it for search engines currently, but I am absolutely doing it for a VPN ( Proton ) for the bonus of having better drive and email attached.

I will agree with you on trusting Proton more than google and how suspicious Proton can seem.

I pay for proton to get both email and VPN. Search really doesn't matter that much to me anymore. I've learned to just live with the annoying aspects of duck duck go, and I use it infrequently enough that i don't think I'd ever be willing to pay for it.

I pay for posteo for email and use Qwant for searches.

For search engine: I'm self hosting SearXNG so I'm already indirectly paying via domain registry/VPS? So yes. Technically this can be done for free though (local docker, random RasPi laying around, ...)

For email: paid (mailbox.org), worth it. Selfhosting email was too much of a headache at least for me

I pay for email. Proton Unlimited atm which includes email, cloud, vpn, password and email aliases. They offer more but that's all I use. Their Linux support is crap so I may move to other services.

For search, I using Startpage. Seems to give me the results I want. Once in a while I change to Brave, Qwant, or DDG.

No. There's no guarantee they won't get greedy and start selling my data anyway. They'd have to have a really good pitch and some way to back it up that would get me to pay. I yet know what it is, but I haven't seen it yet.

No

I paid for an email service to step back from google and the services were so disappointing after a couple years and never improved that i couldn't justify the admittedly low cost and went back to freemails.

My dream IEP would provide secure search, email, calendar, office suite and cloud services. I would pay just one provider for all services combined. I would gladly double my monthly subscription for such a service, with 2 accounts at 50go each

The fuck do you get for paid email? It’s literally just SMTP/POP — where’s the “value add”? I use my own email client so the bullshit ads from Google aren’t an issue, but am I missing out on some email 2.0 magic??

Nope.