Thanks, that's an interesting read.
I know that's one person's opinion and not a thorough research, but that's still plenty of red flags.

I've used the 100 searches in the free trial, thought the search was fine, better than Google's these days. The subscription is a bit steep so I held off, kinda glad I did after digging more into this.

Having what little employees they have also make a mac-only browser, AI stuff and email that their user base doesn't seem to want is all a bit weird.
Buying a t-shirt factory (wtf) with the money they could have used to potentially lower the subscription, but decided to burn through it to give out free t-shirts. That just screams narcissism-driven to me.

Their vague statements on privacy isn't convincing at all.
Some variation of "we don't care about your data" isn't in any way compelling evidence that you care about protecting the privacy of said collected data.

In my opinion they lack focus, commitment and conviction into what I thought was their primary mission at first glance: being a privacy-focused no nonsense search engine.
Although that's probably on me for reading what I wanted to see between the lines and that never was their stated mission, which would explain a lot.