… is also licensing the Bing index. You either fronting Google and co as metasearch, or if its computing any search results itself, very likely the service is licensing Bing or Yandex corpora. There are a few services that build their own index, and then supplement the licensed index to lower their cost (Brave).
I’m fine with bing licensed search results - qwant, ddg, nona… all work for me when I switch for weeks at a time. I think paid search to non-meta search engines is a good idea, then you’re not offloading cost.