To me the $15/mo plan is just bait so users pick the target $30/mo month. Why would you pay $0.016/search when you can pay 8x less and feel smart about making that choice?

edit: looking at it again, I think the $15/mo is actually just for people who wants Phind "private", so that their data is not used for training.

Cost per search isn't really a great metric. For me, I hit the cap of 30 searches/day pretty easily, but 500 is pretty hard to hit. For me, its just a question of what tier matches my volume.