The value proposition is in surfacing a result that you wouldn't already have from the free search engine. Your personal calculus will of course vary but lets do a basic business case with the following assumptions
Free search engines work 95% of the time for your employees searches
Kagi can get a result in half of the remaining 5% (this is definetly the biggest assumption and I haven't had enough experience with kagi to say if this is realistic)
Your employee does 1 search a day and 30 days in a month (so kagi gets you 0.75 more completed searches a month).
It takes an employee 15 minutes to search manually through documentation or come up with a solved algorithm from first principals when the search fails.
In that situation your employees time needs to be worth less than $53.33 dollars an hour for the $10 dollar plan not to break even.
So play with the numbers how you want to make up your own mind but it does seem reasonable to argue there's a market for it at that price. Personal use where missing a result could have no cost is ofcourse another question.
Sure, I'm not contesting that there's a market for it. Going along that line of reasoning, there's also a market for a group of experts you can phone and get an answer from at $100 / hour, and so on. But let's not push the goalposts too much :) My personal calculus says it's not worth $10 for me (I don't rely on search much for my work).
Free search engines work 95% of the time for your employees searches
Kagi can get a result in half of the remaining 5% (this is definetly the biggest assumption and I haven't had enough experience with kagi to say if this is realistic)
Your employee does 1 search a day and 30 days in a month (so kagi gets you 0.75 more completed searches a month).
It takes an employee 15 minutes to search manually through documentation or come up with a solved algorithm from first principals when the search fails.
In that situation your employees time needs to be worth less than $53.33 dollars an hour for the $10 dollar plan not to break even.
So play with the numbers how you want to make up your own mind but it does seem reasonable to argue there's a market for it at that price. Personal use where missing a result could have no cost is ofcourse another question.
edit: 0.75 not 1.5 searches a month extra