Updates to Kagi pricing plans – More searches, unrestricted AI tools

https://blog.kagi.com/plan-changes

by darthShadow • 3 years ago

92 77 3 years ago

blog.kagi.com

Sphax2• 3 years ago

This is cool, even though I haven’t managed to use the monthly 1k searches from the early adopter plan yet.

I have used Kagi for the last 4 months and I’m happy with the experience. The results are good enough that I rarely fallback to Google, even for searches localized to France.

benhurmarcel2• 3 years ago

I quite like that I can have non-localized search by default, and specify a location easily with a bang (like !fr) when needed.

Sphax2• 3 years ago

I had no idea you could do that, super cool.

esafak• 3 years ago

Back to Kagi from Neeva, I guess.

Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad!

sph2• 3 years ago

Eh, if there's one thing I would definitely pay with crypto, is access to a search engine to make me a little harder to trace.

sshine• 3 years ago

There’s a difference between accepting cryptocurrencies as payment, and rewarding you with an NFT every time you perform a search.

freediver6• 3 years ago

Don't pull a web3/blockchain pivot on us, Vlad!

Lol, force is still strong with us, and we are commited to our mission. No distractions!

WirelessGigabit2• 3 years ago

Since you've used both, which one respect AND queries?

Google and DuckDuckGo both ignore me when I type 2 terms for the sake of showing me more ads.

I just checked. Doesn't matter. Neeva is shutting down.

Semaphor3• 3 years ago

Oh wow, that’s a lot. For me, it brings the Professional and Duo plans into the sweet spot (I usually have over 700 but less than 900 searches). I’m not really using the AI features, so for now I’ll stay with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features), but it’s good to know it’s an option now.

I should sign my wife up for the search to see how she likes it and how much she searches, so I can decide if we need duo ;)

freediver6• 3 years ago

with the early-adopter plan (which has limited AI features)

Those limits are gone with this announcement too.

Semaphor3• 3 years ago

Oh wow, nice :)

itchynosedev• 3 years ago

I ran over a 1000 searches as an early adopter last month and this is a welcome change. I also notice how often I search for the same thing over and over, or use product name searches using Kagi as a gateway. I think this shows how poor my learning comprehension / documenting habits are. Thanks for bumping up the limits, though.

I want to utilise lenses and optimise my search better. Any tips?

freediver6• 3 years ago

What makes a great difference is search quality is blocking sites you don't like/don't want to see. This propagates across all types of results (eg images/news too)

I use lenses for specialised searches (I have one for HN/Reddit) ND recipes (to avoid spammy sites). My favorite lenses are "non-commercial" (to surface results from the non-commercial part of the web) and "forums" (usually similar thing but focusing on human comments).

kelvie• 3 years ago

I also ran over last month.

Now I find that I rely heavily on the firefox smart bar to go to pages I've been to before, as well as rely on "bangs" more, which don't count toward the searches.

E.g. !archwiki !mdn !gmaps

californical4• 3 years ago

I left Kagi when they changed their pricing a few months ago, after being a paying customer since the closed beta. Switched away to Neeva, and even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable, since competitor Kagi raised prices so much (they told me yes).

Now that Neeva has collapsed, I’m back at Kagi. But I also bought the highest tier $25 plan because I want them to get my money. Even with these search increases on the lower plans, I understand now that building a privacy focused search engine is expensive. And Kagi has really hit a sweet spot of providing high quality search (often better than google)

I’ve also switched to Orion browser and might start donating for that too. It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab tree that doesn’t look like a hack, or setting a custom ‘new tab’ page).

Huge kudos to the Kagi team for building products that are not only privacy focused, but also just genuinely better products. Search and Orion are both fantastic. I really hope they can be financially sustainable.

runnerup• 3 years ago

I think Neeva needed user signup growth more than it needed cash. It was reasonably well funded through VC. If it had shown adoption growth they would have received more VC money to continue even if they were losing money on each user.

Kagi appears to be more bootstrapped, so it's very, very important for them to always maintain healthy marginal profits on each user. In this case, your cash is probably very appreciated, and hopefully they're net positive overall so can afford years of potential stagnation after this boom time while still earning a decent living. That allows them to be around to get sudden influxes of new customers whenever various self-inflicted crises damage the incumbents brands. Time in market vs. timing the market.

freediver6• 3 years ago

Well put, "time in market" is a thing when going against a habit so entrenched as search is.

zirgs4• 3 years ago

How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN?

I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account. They can then associate all of your searches to that account just like google and bing do when you use them while logged in.

david38• 3 years ago

I searched for certain things that google didn’t show me for ten pages that Kagi did on the first. For example, a divorce filing of someone

switch0073• 3 years ago

I feel Google’s ability to track and profile you extends far beyond your IP address and/or a login

kaba0• 3 years ago

Slightly unrelated, but Google has become increasingly less accurate at returning pages. I am looking for a change even outside of its huge privacy violations.

jpalomaki• 3 years ago

Kagi is not showing ads.

Ads are (often) a distraction. Mostly my brain just ignores them, but occasionally they trick me to some sidetrack and I forget for a while what I was doing.

nicky02• 3 years ago

Kagi has good quality search results (better than Google in many cases), works well and has no ads or promoted content. I'm personally not using it for extreme privacy / anonymity reasons, I just want a good experience using the search engine.

Semaphor3• 3 years ago

How is Kagi better than simply using google without an account through a VPN? Or using DDG through a VPN?

More features (lenses, explicit personalization), more results (it’s bing + google indexes + extra), and better results (IMO).

I really don't like that Kagi requires you to have an account.

Many don’t, but you lose a lot of what makes it so much better without it.

They can then associate all of your searches to that account

Yes, but then the rationale is that they are so expensive, so they don’t need to do shady shit like that. Currently, they don’t even save your history which is planned as an optional feature for later (so you can look into your own history).

carlosjobim4• 3 years ago

The search results are better. That's why I'm using it. The privacy part is not important to me, but having the best search results possible is important. I'm done wasting my time.

gnicholas• 3 years ago

It has features that I can’t get in Firefox (like a vertical tab bar that doesn’t look like a hack).

Huh? Firefox has had great vertical tabs, thanks to Tree Style Tabs, for decades. Orion doesn’t supper hierarchical tabs, like Firefox does.

I use Orion and Brave, both of which are experimenting with vertical tabs, but if Firefox were as fast as Brave I’d be full-time on that. The tabbed browsing experience on Firefox has always been the best, in my book.

californical4• 3 years ago

I used Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but it looks like it was tacked-on (because it is). Also Firefox doesn’t have a good way to hide the normal top tab bar, so you have to go into browser-chrome CSS and hide some UI elements.

not_your_vase2• 3 years ago

even messaged the customer support at Neeva to ask if they were financially stable

Offtopic, but what answer were you expecting?

"Thank you for your message. We advise you not to start using our services, we are on the brink of shutting down, just haven't announced it yet."

californical4• 3 years ago

Fair, maybe oversimplified for the sake of the above comment.

Rather, I asked the Neeva support person if the $6 price was sustainable, and if they foresaw a need to raise prices. I mentioned that Kagi called out increased costs from Bing, and asked if Neeva was impacted as well, and whether $6 was enough to support their costs.

I was hoping to mostly just let them know that customers care about this stuff, but they responded to me by saying that they have an in-house index and Bing costs are not a problem for them, due to their private index.

So even though they likely answered my question honestly that Bing costs increasing didn’t impact them as much as it did Kagi, it seems they had much bigger cost problems instead!

paulgb• 3 years ago

setting a custom ‘new tab’ page

Aside, but it’s so crazy to me that both Chrome and Firefox lack this option. There are third party extensions for it, which is the official solution, but I’d rather minimize the number of third-party extensions I use.

croutonwagon• 3 years ago

I setup account limits to the $25 water mark with the plan to just swap to that, probably for the annual re-up option.

Then today I noticed they upped their quota. Talk about timing. Ill proabbly stick to monthly for a while. Honestly not sure what is better for them, a monthly sub or an annual (at a discounted rate). As it looks I'll probably be around 1k searches a month.

https://imgur.com/a/ZbnWUao

a 25/mon bill was kinda steep. But 10 is definately digestible for me. So I am quite happy with the swap and the quality of the searches.

sph2• 3 years ago

As an early adopter doing 1200 searches a month, this is a good change. I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota.

As for the AI, I really don't care. I am cautious for now, I just hope the work on actual search doesn't get left by the wayside to chase the latest GPT trend.

Preferring AI-filtered results over a what is basically a full-text search over a massive index is why Google Search has become so useless. Sorry, machine, I know better.

I guess Kagi has to choose whether they want to court the power users like me, or the grandmas that Google is focusing on and want a more natural query interface. The reason why I'm paying for Kagi is because it seems to respect my queries, and does not try to interpret, rewrite them or do anything more than I have asked.

benhurmarcel2• 3 years ago

Well on my side I've been quite happy with their summarizer tool. It doesn't mess with my query, but saves time when I want an overview of some long content or video.

carlosjobim4• 3 years ago

I really disliked having to use Brave Search a bit more towards the end of the month to stay within my quota.

Is it really that important to stay within the quota? You're literally counting cents.

spookie• 3 years ago

Seems I'm back to kagi :) Only thing I need is better non-anglosphere results, but it's understandable for now.

Minor49er• 3 years ago

What kinds of results are you trying to find?

plaguepilled• 3 years ago

I would love a "dumb" search that strips out EVERYTHING except the results and their summaries. No AI. No images. Nothin'.

At present I just filter it out with ublock, but I wish I didn't have to, y'know?

jerjerjer2• 3 years ago

"Dumb" things are going away. Wanted to buy a small speaker recently. Almost every model is riddled with: 1) Smart assistans 2) Manufacturer app (with treble/bass/eq controls locked in app).

Same things with TV and many more home appliances.

We are expected to pay extra to finance data collection ops on ourselves and be happy for the priviledge.

MichaelZuo• 3 years ago

High end small speakers still are mostly usable, with purely optional apps.

Look into B&O.

not_your_vase2• 3 years ago

My problem isn't that I have to filter, but the remaining part is pretty much useless.

Google is worse every day. Bing isn't getting any better either. DDG is of course Bing, with extra filters. Yandex is.. well... for some very niche searches it's actually nice, as long as it's a topic Russians don't care about. But they display a captcha every 2nd click. Marginalia goes only for niche sites, which is great if you are looking for that. But it avoids mainstream. Have been playing with Mojeek recently, but it seems to lack a bunch of websites also.

Personally I'm considering running my personal Marginalia (at least it's open source), with my own sitefilter. But still just considering.

darthmallrat• 3 years ago

You can get pretty close to this using Kagi's search settings and then using the custom css option to hide the remaining bits.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

How does their AI services compare to chatgpt+?

DoingIsLearning• 3 years ago

The Universal Summarizer is very impressive and a huge time saver, haven't used the rest.

ryanjshaw• 3 years ago

Anybody else bothered by the Kagi pledge "to contribute 5% of our profits to the following [political] organizations that align with our mission of humanizing the web"? [1]

The last thing I want to do when making a decision about subscribing to a product is having to go through the list of organisations they donate to and checking for values alignment - nevermind what happens when that list changes and I don't notice it.

Yes, I'm fully aware that they could privately donate profits anyway. In my mind, this upfront commitment creates a direct link between my actions and the recipients of the donations. Since these are political organisations I then feel obligated to research them.

To be clear: I'm fine with donations to technical organisations like the Crystal Language or Python donations.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html

sokoloff• 3 years ago

Those don’t seem like overtly/overly political causes to me.

theage3• 3 years ago

humanizing the web

How do they square this mission statement with AI summaries and content-vectorized chat bots? are the summaries going to be so long and bad on purpose you are still forced to click though occasionally? just so the possibly human web site runner feels glee.

freediver6• 3 years ago

Here is a detailed explaination:

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy

DarthNebo• 3 years ago

what a spam article for HN

ulrikrasmussen• 3 years ago

Oh, what a nice coincidence! I signed up for Kagi Standard last month and today I hit my 200 search limit this morning. 300 searches will be plenty for a month's use.

Kagi is pretty great, by the way. I was using DuckDuckGo before and Kagi is significantly faster and gives better results.

entropyie• 3 years ago

Good to know, I was close to my limit this month!

Keep up the good work.

nottorp4• 3 years ago

What's a Kagi search?

I'm thinking of my usage patterns here. I tend to leave searches (and results but that's not Kagi's problem) open in the browser for days/weeks and come back to them when I need them again.

I also use the auto tab discard extension, which will of course unload the tab after a few minutes out of focus.

Let's also consider the machine going into sleep mode.

Will those actions trigger a new Kagi search and bring down my monthly search counter?

nicky02• 3 years ago

If the page is not cached by the browser, but its instead reloaded from the Kagi server then it would be a new search.

nottorp4• 3 years ago

Looks to me like they need to cache search result sets then before it's fair. I have to have an account anyway.

Not to mention incrementally refining a search by adding/removing/changing keywords.

Those limits start to look increasingly low to me. As in, not your main search engine but the option to use when all else fails.

Of course they don't mind because it's subscription pricing.

carlosjobim4• 3 years ago

Does it matter? You're talking about less than 2 cents. We all have a finite time, do you want to spend your days worrying about a few cents? The energy and time you spend on that could make you at least 4 cents or even more if put to other purposes.

nottorp4• 3 years ago

Aren't we talking about subscriptions with a limited number of searches that run out here?

password4321• 3 years ago

These alternative search engines need to partner with Mullvad for payment authentication to maximize privacy.

jsnell• 3 years ago

Mullvad have their own alternative search engine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397

andrewinardeer• 3 years ago

They don't.

It is a front end to the Google Search API.

https://leta.mullvad.net/faq

TradingPlaces• 3 years ago

Great product; happy subscriber. I never bumped up against the 1k searches, but thanks anyway, Vlad!

WirelessGigabit2• 3 years ago

Time to take them for a spin I guess. I'm done with Google not respecting my queries. 2 words. I want them both on the page. If I want synonyms I'll type the synonym.

It has made my life so much harder when trying to search for <popular product> <rare issue>. 100s of pages showing the product, none with my problem...

Updates to Kagi pricing plans – More searches, unrestricted AI tools

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