Somewhere between 20,000 (number of t-shirts sent out) and 50,000 (their stated next target). Not too bad for a startup but a drop in the proverbial ocean of search.

They have a live tracker of subscribers, 25,785 at time of posting comment.

https://kagi.com/stats

how one can run search engine on 2-3M annual budget(with assumption avg subscription is $10/m)?..

Honestly I'm astonished there are only that many.

How? For the vast, vast majority of people, paying for search is insane. And that includes the people who pay for other services.

Judging from how often Kagi comes up here (HN), I actually thought they were far bigger than they are.

The percentage of HN users in their customer base is very probably far higher than the percentage of HN users in the general population. Many orders of magnitude ;)

Why don't you read the post you're commenting on? The answer is in there.

cause commenter was making claim that was not grounded in reality so i thought i missed something