If the motivation is specifically to kill DDG, that'd be bad. If the motivation is that the search API business is not profitable right now, they need to raise

If the motivation is specifically to kill DDG, that'd be bad. If the motivation is that the search API business is not profitable right now, they need to raise prices to be viable, and it's incidental that DDG can't be viable at those prices, that's fine. (Why would it not be profitable any more? Maybe it never was, and they've been selling the API access at below cost to try to effectively buy the query stream and get scale that way. Maybe they're planning to massively improve search quality, and the costs will go up.)