Could Kagi Ultimate be a good replacement for ChatGPT? A subscription there would save me some money if it was similar.

Just recently started paying for Kagi search and quite love it.

Mostly depends on which features are most important for you. I'm a SWE, so using their Assistant for Web RAG nearly exclusively for work-related stuff and for most of my personal queries. I'm rarely using multi-modal content, mostly sticking to text. They support many providers and new notable models are typically rolled out only a few days after release which is always great to test out. I have a standalone subscription for coding agent LLM. If above aligns - might be a good choice.

That’s what I did and I’m pretty happy with it. I just fall back to something free on the rare occasion I want an image generated (tbh, mostly emojis of my dog).

Mostly, yes.

You have a spend limit, but the assistant has dozens of of models