Not paid, but Ecosia based in Germany and Qwant based in France. Plus they are working together on an EU based index. For now they rely on Americans in majority like Kagi and DuckDuckGo do afaik.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2026
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Haven't used it, so can't say I endorse it, but this is the answer to your question.
From their website:
After 12 months as a paying customer, you get a copy of the source code.
That's an interesting arrangement. I guess there's nothing wrong with it. But I'm not sure what the benefit is supposed to be since they presumably retain exclusive rights to use that code commercially.
retain exclusive rights to use that code commercially.
Which would enable you to run your private instance, if you'd like.
Maybe, but if they're using paid APIs for access and not scraping like SearXNG, you may not even be able to set up a paid API account on many search engines, so your instance may be heavily limited.
Is it a copy or access to their repo? If you just get a copy once, it does not really enable people to selfhost it.
That is not open source at all though lol wtf
12 months trust me bro
I am using it. It's good. No AI bullshit.
Image search also good?
You pay for it, how? Is the payment decoupled from searches? With metager it is
I couldn't tell you because, again, I haven't used them, but I can tell you they have a very lengthy FAQ page for questions just like yours.
Go nuts.
Thanks
They are sooo weird
Source code will be made available to customers who have been paying for at least 12 months.
This is not open source and not even source available lol
Once your account has been active for at least 12 months, a Source Code link appears in the footer. You can download a ZIP of the current web app under the Business Source License 1.1, which converts to AGPL-3.0 two years after each bundle is built.
That is source available to open source but not actually because it is not yet available. So do they give everyone access to those archives? In theory only customers need access so this could be legal, IF every customer immediately gets access to that old A-GPL code.
You may self-host for personal, non-commercial use. Commercial use and competing products or services are not permitted.
This is not AGPL then lol, you can do what you want but you must publish source code
Please do not publish the archive publicly; this is for transparency, not a community open-source project, and we generally do not accept contributions.
Yeah no, if it was for transparency they would publish it at least to every customer.
I've been using https://metager.org/ for a years and have no complaints (ecxept for image search being complete trash).
Easily this
Install their browser extension for blind tokens and anonymous payments
Also works on ironfox (firefox android)
Isn't Kagi mostly just a meta search engine aggregating results from the usual suspects with some added independent index building?
That's not exactly a rare feature, in fact most independent search engines do exactly that (querying the big searches while building their own index on top), and for free.
Also you can self-host a metasearch engine (for example: see here) or use one of the several dozen ones other people self-host and make available to the public.
Indeed, they do have their own index though their search results also include results from various other APIs ^[1]^
Not EU, but swisscows.com is the closest I can think of
They advertise the snakeoil messenger TeleGuard. Apparently it is proprietary, which does not really create trust. They claim they don't store anything, but without trust... idk