As someone who used to do a decent amount of web and search engine results scraping in a past life, one thing I’ve never understood about DDG is how on earth th

As someone who used to do a decent amount of web and search engine results scraping in a past life, one thing I’ve never understood about DDG is how on earth this setup is economical. If they’re hitting (presumably) bing’s api a few billion times a month, surely they’re paying a lot of cash to do that, even at a heavily negotiated rate. Also, so many folks here are saying they use the bang option to search Google, through DDG. So either they’re using google’s search api or scraping on the background, both of which are expensive in their own ways. Beyond technical, at a business level, how are they actually pulling this off?