As with some of the comments on that post, I don't find the author of your linked post, nor the 'lori' who wrote the post they refer to make a terribly compelling argument of why people should not use Kagi.

Fourtunately there are free options that dont habe AI, ads, sponsored content, or steal your data.

SearXNG ftw!

They're paying for Google too, but they're using the credit card of their students' privacy.

Yeah i thought they wrote this article ending with "contact us to get free education tier" but instead it's an ads for the paid education tier with free trial.

Yeah. They do offer Kagi free for libraries for a year, so I’m curious how much they actually charge for education plans

https://kagi.com/libraries

As far as public education, yeah Kagi doesn't have the legal and compliance framework to even attempt. You'd also need to provide an alternative to the whole docs/drive/etc ecosystem.

For like colleges though, I think there's a more viable path — I can't see their purely per-seat pricing model working though; and is also the problem I see with their "teams" plan. The better way there is to either provide a hybrid and/or totally ala carte pricing model, one where you pay per seat and also get a number of searches added to the whole plan ($3/seat + 250 searches); and another where you don't have seats and instead just accumulate searches and pay at the end of the month based on your search volume. Otherwise the upfront $10/user seat costs in their current billing are hard to justify.