Not quite independent as it’s a meta-search, but I developed a subscription based one at search.waterfox.net. Pays for the infrastructure costs and remains ad/tracking free.

Nice! I couldn't see the list of search engines that are included in your meta-search, the FAQ currently seems to imply that it only serves Google results?

If you give users the option to include / not include certain search engines in their results, so their money never goes to those particular engine companies, that could be of interest to some Kagi refugees.

I ended up vibe coding my own meta-search engine (augmented with a local SQlite database of hand-picked sites) so that I could escape Kagi, but I'm excited if Waterfox Search is an alternative I can recommend to others!