For anyone else wondering, they raised $670,000 from 42 small investors in June 2023. Non-traditional fundraise. I agree that spending that money on t-shirts is weird. As a new Kagi subscriber I don't want a t-shirt. I want a thriving search engine.
Suggestion for Kagi: If you haven't made the t-shirts yet, offer users to request/reserve one first. That way you won't ship to those who don't want it (though you won't ship to some who do, so maybe save some t-shirts on the side for those willing to contact you to ask if there's any left after the deadline)
Reading the blog post it sounds like users will get a credit toward a free shirt/stickers. They will still need to pay shipping, which should be enough to keep people from getting it just for the hell of it. After a period of time, if there are unclaimed shirts they will open them up to those users beyond the first 20k.
While it sounds like they will print 20k no matter what, it doesn’t seem like they will randomly ship them out to users. They really can’t, as they don’t have the addresses of all their users.
"Sizes are first come first serve" so I suppose they estimate how many of each size they need and then let people get a shirt as long as their size is available.
https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round