For other alternatives with their own engine - the main ones are Yandex, Mojeek, and Qwant. DuckDuckGo is good, but most of their results come from Bing.
Kagi is priced well for what you get. Search engines are very expensive to run. You don’t have to pay for the premium AI, and the pricing of the starter ($5/month for 300 searches) and pro ($10/m for unlimited searches) plans hasn’t been affected by AI. They’ve remained the same price ever since they launched in 2022.