Fair Pricing

1134 480 1 year ago

efitz2• 1 year ago

Kudos for adopting a user friendly billing policy.

I would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits automatic renewal billing if the service hasn’t been used for some time.

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

how would that be enforced?

moooo99• 1 year ago

Fines

scott_w6• 1 year ago

European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:

- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)

- Proactively investigate and check

- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results

I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.

yellowapple5• 1 year ago

I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.

This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.

That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.

...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.

TheSpiceIsLife5• 1 year ago

My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.

We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.

prawn• 1 year ago

Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?

camhart• 1 year ago

You're assuming there is no cost to the business when the service isn't actively being used. Thats not always the case.

mcintyre1994• 1 year ago

Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?

globular-toast• 1 year ago

Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.

Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.

Maken• 1 year ago

That seems unlikely, since soon there will be no FTC policies at all.

siddharthgoel88• 1 year ago

This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that I understood it correctly.

haxton• 1 year ago

Kindle has been doing this for years and has really made me a loyal customer to them. Always surprised the penny pinchers at Amazon haven't killed it yet.

nicolas_t• 1 year ago

You mean kindle unlimited? That's the only monthly subscription they have?

denkmoon2• 1 year ago

That's great, but I can't even imagine "forgetting" to use Kagi. Completely indispensable.

optionalsquid• 1 year ago

It's also hard to forget once you've set it as your default browser. So I imagine that it'll mostly benefit people on the limited (300 search/month) tier, where you might want to ration your searches

vincnetas2• 1 year ago

Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable? Just subscribed, and looking around.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?

The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.

Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.

Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.

greatgib• 1 year ago

For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing a search and getting straight and instantly the results that I need, without crap.

Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.

When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.

lostlogin6• 1 year ago

In no particular order: Pinning results. Blocking Pinterest, the top few results aren’t spam. They are interesting.

bearjaws• 1 year ago

Remember how 10 years ago you would Google something and it would just give you the result you needed in the first 3 results? Yeah, kagi does that.

sodapopcan• 1 year ago

Up-ranking, down-ranking, and straight up blocking sites is a big one for me. No more scrolling past w3schools or geeksforgeeks for this guy!

Also, it's built in that sites with a ton of ads are down-ranked.

tstrimple• 1 year ago

I don't use Kagi anymore but the main thing I miss is the absence of "Popular products" which is completely useless and comes up far too often when using Google to find retail products and black listing websites from the search results. Outside of that, the results were largely similar.

denkmoon2• 1 year ago

Quality search results while not making myself a google user. De-googling is quite important to me. Besides that, basically what everyone else said; it upranks or downranks domains based on my settings, the claude AI answers are pretty good, and the no bullshit interface.

burkaman• 1 year ago

No ads, no forced "AI summary", doesn't sell my data to anyone. There are many other quality of life features, I don't consider any of them personally indispensable except for the ability to permanently remove a site from results, which I have used a few times.

I haven't used Google in many years so I can't directly compare the search quality, but Kagi is good enough that I've never had any reason to try something else since I've started using it.

Edit: I also use the !w Wikipedia bang constantly, I forgot that was a Kagi feature and not my browser. Obviously Kagi is not the only search engine with this feature though.

moffkalast• 1 year ago

Let's be real, this lets them have a free PR win without having to actually give up anything at all.

AdamN2• 1 year ago

It's funny, I don't even look at the Kagi logo anymore. I just see search results and occasionally notice that I"m using Kagi because I see the token in the request url.

junon• 1 year ago

Well I guess it's finally time to try Kagi then.

rettichschnidi• 1 year ago

Would love to see Kagi and Mozilla to collaborate.

throwaway2905• 1 year ago

Could be problematic since Kagi keeps paying Yandex/Russia and there's sanctions you know...

ilvez• 1 year ago

I weekly monitor for news that they somehow allow using Kagi without Yandex. Still hurts after nearly 2 years of Kagi using to drop them. Without using Yandex at least I could convince myself that my money at least directly won't flow to Russia. I could revisit the idea of using Kagi again.

Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about it anymore.

ImHereToVote2• 1 year ago

Yandex is a godsend to get information behind the silicon curtain.

SllX2• 1 year ago

I have too much respect for Kagi to want to see them overshadowed by Mozilla in any kind of partnership. In particular, I am a very recent but very happy convert to the Orion web browser which uses WebKit (not Blink, not Chromium, certainly not Electron, but WebKit) but supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions even in the iPhone and iPad apps, and has zero telemetry baked in and doesn't try to upsell you on a read-it-later service that was a questionable purchase by Mozilla even at the time it was made.

Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit; and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly good for them if that happens.

annexrichmond2• 1 year ago

Kagi is awesome, but the thought of having a limit led me to use it less and less and I eventually unsubscribed.

_kidlike• 1 year ago

The 10$ plan doesn't have a limit anymore!

zaptrem• 1 year ago

This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for especially crazy hours or something).

annexrichmond2• 1 year ago

yeah that's interesting. $5 for 35/day could be better as well

throwaway2905• 1 year ago

I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result.

So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.

But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.

fooqux• 1 year ago

Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.

The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.

yellowapple5• 1 year ago

Probably won't affect me much, since I've happily been a daily user since learning about them at Handmade Seattle last year, but I'm glad they're going this route nonetheless.

z645• 1 year ago

Always happy to hear people finding us through HMS! It's a fantastic community, and the Handmade ethos resonates deeply with a lot of us on the team.

Thank you for your support.

- Zac

vincnetas2• 1 year ago

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im subscribing just to vote with my wallet.

Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.

beAbU• 1 year ago

Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.

aimazon• 1 year ago

I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.

import• 1 year ago

You’re the main income source for the Netflix :)

larusso3• 1 year ago

Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that.

About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.

vasco2• 1 year ago

I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue is dormant "gym" accounts by now.

quser1• 1 year ago

that's called car rentals :)

pcthrowaway• 1 year ago

Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.

The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.

Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.

tedsanders• 1 year ago

5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.)

https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...

BossingAround4• 1 year ago

To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).

idle_zealot• 1 year ago

Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.

Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.

robertlagrant3• 1 year ago

See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.

paranoidrobot• 1 year ago

Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.

I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.

robertlagrant3• 1 year ago

Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.

mihaaly• 1 year ago

We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly)

Kagi in the other hand is useful.

Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )

vachina• 1 year ago

lol we’ve gone full circle to essentially piecemeal rent a movie model.

kmacdough• 1 year ago

Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.

omega3• 1 year ago

I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.

jcul• 1 year ago

Yeah I do this for some services, subscribe and cancel immediately so I don't forget. It works quite well.

Shorn• 1 year ago

No good. Not fair.

I put money into the account, you bill me per search - pre-paid usage based billing is the only way this can ever be "fair".

whs• 1 year ago

Kagi used to have limits on all plans, and I feel like associating cost to typos is a bad experience that you'd never have on ads-supported engines. Even now on starter plan (300/month) a mistyped query would cost you $0.0166 each.

Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.

ThePowerOfFuet• 1 year ago

The time it took you to submit this comment was surely worth an awful lot of those $0.0166...

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

you bill me per search

This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible target market.

freehorse3• 1 year ago

Their search API is in beta right now.You can apply for access or wait for it to be released. I guess then making a front end to call it is simple eg an llm could make it.

bux93• 1 year ago

A sliding scale would make sense. Don't use it? Don't pay anything. Fewer than x searches? Pay Y per search. More than z searches? Pay z * y for unlimited use.

I suspect this would also work great for streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6 platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the door open for incidental users.

casenmgreen2• 1 year ago

I trialed Kagi.

I liked it, the results were good, no ads, gave me access to Google without being tracked.

I would pay for that, except they block Tor, and I normally use Tor.

throwaway2905• 1 year ago

gave me access to Google without being tracked

Hint: you can use Google in private mode. And unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.

bugtodiffer3• 1 year ago

unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.

That's like driving without light and seat belt. Should be very obvious to every HN reader, that a content (ad) blocker is the first thing you install

z645• 1 year ago

Heya, this is Zac from Kagi.

We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own self-hosted Tor node[1].

We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their support to improve this generally.

Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the node though :) If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...

0xbs0d• 1 year ago

I used to have issues with VPNs but it’s been a long time ago. Works flawlessly now.

casenmgreen2• 1 year ago

Good - looks like Kagi will be on the menu.

Note that URL is 403, from Tor browser.

Works fine from non-Tor.

(I'm now experimenting with the Kagi hidden service.)

geakstr• 1 year ago

Hey! This url and any search I do are blocked with 403 if I access it either with Tor or my VPN. Anyway I love kagi and continue to use this, but this aspect is pretty annoying.

manmal• 1 year ago

Ok that’s it, I‘ll renew my account now. I‘ve been using it two years ago and was pretty happy, until a problem in my payment processor failed the payments to Kagi. I thought I wouldn’t miss it, but lately I haven’t been happy with DDG and been reaching more for Google, or should I say suffering Google?

I also thought for a while that things like ChatGPT internet search or perplexity would replace DDG and Kagi, but, so far, I just want slop free sources to back up the slop I generated purposely in R1.

fhd22• 1 year ago

Exactly! For a lot of work, I use Claude as my first source, then typically I verify what I got out of it with a search engine. If the search engine also starts to hallucinate (starting to see that on Google if I'm not crazy), I have zero use for it. I want results that match my search query, period.

pbronez2• 1 year ago

Kagi also has solid AI features.

Their Quick Answer feature does an AI summary of your query results. By default it shows up automatically when it has high confidence. You can disable this in settings or force it to show up by adding "?" to your query.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

If you want to jump into an AI chat session, you can add bangs to your queries. "!expert" launches a top of the line research agent and "!code" is good and software development. Both of these use the underlying search engine to get current facts.

Kagi even maintains their own LLM benchmark to monitor how well different models perform. They occasionally swap out default models to keep performance SOTA. You can specify a specific model if you want.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html

nomilk• 1 year ago

I'd pay more for more search results (as opposed to searches, which are already unlimited with Kagi subscriptions). I found google unbearable when it removed the '100 results' default setting (until I found a chrome extension). But I stopped using Kagi for the same reason. Sometimes seeing lots of search results has its advantages, for example when gauging how common/popular a term is, or just being able to quickly survey many sites, or seeing where one of your sites/article appears in the search rankings.

Kagi attempts to only provide results it thinks will be relevant. While I liked the accurate results, I was frustrated when none of the 5-10 results was what I was after; at that point the UX is to type a new search term rather than simply scrolling further (I prefer the latter).

One other small downside is I slightly missed google's 'WebAnswers' (certain google searches will display images and summary info for the search term, rather than strictly results). WebAnswers were handy on super quick searches for, say, a particular car or aircraft model). I didn't think I'd miss this, but I did, although it was very minor.

CaptainFever• 1 year ago

Pleasantly surprised. Nice job, Kagi! This is consumer-friendly and to be commended.

Euphorbium• 1 year ago

Would be great if every company was forced by law to do this. Pay only for what you use.

manx• 1 year ago

Why not directly pay what you use? Similar to how LLM Apis are billed these days.

raincole• 1 year ago

Because they don't want the users to feel stressful for using their product more.

LLM Apis...

Yeah exactly, ChatGPT doesn't have this option for their web interface either, only for API. For the same reason.

ciphix• 1 year ago

This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.

barnabee2• 1 year ago

Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly around specific UI features).

Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.

[0] https://docs.openwebui.com/ (one liner if you have `uv` installed)

dirkc• 1 year ago

This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it.

So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you would be with a new subscription.

Furthermore this generates goodwill, and I'm guessing goodwill has some % that converts to conversions and lower churn.

fnord123• 1 year ago

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

thih9• 1 year ago

Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.

eviks• 1 year ago

not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...

scott_w6• 1 year ago

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.

OskarS• 1 year ago

A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.

boringg• 1 year ago

Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.

Jentifgq• 1 year ago

guess we'll have to switch back to ARPU now...

Seb-C• 1 year ago

AFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to any investor.

ajkjk• 1 year ago

more importantly it's kind to the users

(historically not so important to companies in practice, but it sure ought to be)

simonebrunozzi• 1 year ago

We have implemented this for the simple reason of being kind to our users.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is also the correct one.

mercwear2• 1 year ago

This will come out in due diligence if the investor is not just throwing money at whatever moves.

yreg2• 1 year ago

If the streaming services did this, I would probably have a lot more of them.

BossingAround4• 1 year ago

If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream.

Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.

ogrisel• 1 year ago

Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.

jaza3• 1 year ago

I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.

nthingtohide• 1 year ago

Then a particular show becomes a hit. And the company hasn't planned hardware for the spike in traffic because no one was using it before.

rqtwteye• 1 year ago

Basically you want per stream pricing.

user568439• 1 year ago

Yes a lot of people does this manually. But the services predate on the people that is too busy or lazy to unsubscribe and I'm afraid they are a much larger group.

ant6n2• 1 year ago

I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn’t really that much better than Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while just entering queries, and then the chance to find something better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might make more sense, especially if it’s designed not to blow through queries quickly and transparent about how many searches were actually done.

Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.

pfix• 1 year ago

From kagi.com:

No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search.

So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi target audience.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 1 year ago

I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a day with always relevant results while the GPTs always hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you search.

LoganDark2• 1 year ago

According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50 times a day.

    Date (UTC)   AI Tokens  Searches
    Feb 5, 2025  0          64
    Feb 4, 2025  0          43
    Feb 3, 2025  0          19
    Feb 2, 2025  0          24
    Feb 1, 2025  0          19

They don't seem to track any form of history, only the number of searches (since some of their plans have a quota). I pay for unlimited searches, but the stats are still interesting :)

mathw2• 1 year ago

I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.

It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".

frereubu2• 1 year ago

My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.

m-schuetz2• 1 year ago

I found it way better simply because you can blacklist garbage SEO'd sites.

andyjohnson0• 1 year ago

I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.

On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.

As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.

angoragoats• 1 year ago

Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.

What is the value of ChatGPT relative to Google? It's not obvious to me.

allan_s• 1 year ago

Is there a lot of feedback from companies that have switched to similar model ? (how much it improved churn, customer lifetime value etc.)

WiSaGaN• 1 year ago

You are really underestimating how many users just forget they have such unused subscriptions, and how much of subscription based company monthly revenue is those that are not used at all.

Lutger• 1 year ago

There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.

RALaBarge• 1 year ago

That is what this effort is aimed at: sleezy status quo

indymike• 1 year ago

Forcing people to pay for something they are not using is a time bomb. This is a good thing and we should all be looking at how to do this.

startupsfail• 1 year ago

Hey Google, I want my $2/month for 100GB subscription back. It had disappeared and only $20/month for 2TB plus subpar AI that I don’t use remains.

verdverm3• 1 year ago

I'd prefer a pay-as-you-go / per API call / search pricing model... to something that if I use it just once, I pay full price for a month. Same rationale for AI in my IDE, I'm waiting for the pricing models to change

dghlsakjg• 1 year ago

There are any number of plugins for all of the popular IDEs/text editors that let you use metered AI usage using an API key.

For VS code compatible plugins checkout Cline/Roo or just search for AI in the extensions.

merlinnn• 1 year ago

The downside is that price per unit will increase as minimum unit size goes down. You're essentially buying at a "retail" price whereas the monthly bundle is wholesale.

But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.

MarcelOlsz• 1 year ago

I'm still waiting for a $150 refund from pieter levels from his crappy ai interior site, didn't log in once.

lyu07282• 1 year ago

if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono

z645• 1 year ago

We would like to eventually offer everyone an API credit stipend with their subscription. Our APIs should get plenty of love this year, so please stay tuned.

also they blocked my vpn's another big nono

Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to support@kagi.com with details and we will see what we can do.

Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is helpful for you.

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

Why not charge x ct per search. Or rather, x ct per click through. Or rather, x ct per action on a target website?

Search = advertisements

ajdude3• 1 year ago

Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.

A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing

I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.

I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.

SllX2• 1 year ago

I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.

But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.

neilv• 1 year ago

For the frugal-minded customers, will this be motivation to avoid using the service for the first time that month (and a little sinking feeling when you do)?

dmos622• 1 year ago

My first thought. I'd think that first N searches being free each month would fix that for me. Paying for the full month for 1 search feels off, but paying the same for 10 searches dilutes the feeling by factor of 10.

promiseofbeans6• 1 year ago

But then it becomes a question of where exactly draw the line? And if you're going to do that, why not just charge per search so that you're not wasting money on searches you aren't using? Now you just have metered billing.

We've seen how that plays out with cloud computing: a few people wayyyy overpay and subsidise a lot of people on the free/cheap tiers

ajdude3• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service.

Keep up the good work guys!

nmstoker• 1 year ago

I'm in exactly the same situation as you.

I would really struggle going back to not having bad sites suppressed in search results!

user39393822• 1 year ago

My pitch to friends is that it’s like Google used to be before they started adding all the crap to their results and ignoring your search terms.

Really, it’s even better than that given the full feature set.

CarRamrod• 1 year ago

Note to self: Make something good enough that friends will feel the need to make up pitches for their friends to use said thing.

jorvi2• 1 year ago

Absolutely seconded.

What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".

Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).

Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.

Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:

  /*
  Hide pre-translated webpages.
  "sri-group" is main result, "__srgi"  are sub results.
  You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
  */
  :is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
    display: none !important;
  }*

ajdude3• 1 year ago

That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.

0x38B• 1 year ago

I did not know this about Kagi!

I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.

Gareth3212• 1 year ago

It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.

beretguy• 1 year ago

You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022

neoromantique2• 1 year ago

The problem is not showing stuff from Yandex, the problem is that by paying Kagi you Yandex by proxy and that is an absolute red line for many people.

jagermo• 1 year ago

same here, I need the highest tier available :)

oellegaard• 1 year ago

I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which is of course not their fault.

blurrybird• 1 year ago

How is them not supporting Safari not their fault?

arrosenberg• 1 year ago

FWIW, Kagi makes a browser called Orion that comes with ad blocking packaged in and works exceptionally well.

pietz• 1 year ago

It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.

vinhcognito• 1 year ago

I honestly can't imagine Kagi being worse than Google. At minimum, Kagi lets me derank and ban domains I don't like.

kstrauser4• 1 year ago

Kagi doesn’t insert lies into the search results.[0] If that’s all it did better than Google, that alone would make it better.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766725

otter-in-a-suit• 1 year ago

It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google if I need local results / Google Maps.

What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.

fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.

Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.

idamantium2• 1 year ago

Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo for many of us.

- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.

- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.

- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.

- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.

All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.

I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.

ukd1• 1 year ago

Ditto - I've been a paying user since June 22. I've basically used Google a handful of times since, and been disappointed each time. Well worth it.

shortrounddev22• 1 year ago

I just wish the unlimited plan was $5 instead of $10

gjm11• 1 year ago

I too wish that the things I might spend money on were half the price.

nicholasjarnold• 1 year ago

Same. Kagi has been a breath of fresh air after suffering years of enshittification with other search engines whom are much more interested in your clickstream than providing you with quality results.

Good job Kagi et al!

Lammy• 1 year ago

Same here. I don't often feel the need to shill for paid products but Kagi is so good that I want to do everything I can to make sure it sticks around. It's like air in the sense that it's easy to forget how much I need it until I suddenly don't have it lol

I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read before about an extremely niche local history topic.

idamantium2• 1 year ago

Me, too!

What I love most about this fair pricing is it makes it was more appealing to encourage my friends to give it a try. Thank you, Kagi!

shermozle• 1 year ago

Yeah was thinking just this. Looks like I do 600-900 searches a month with Kagi!

perdomon• 1 year ago

If you're comfortable sharing, what is your job/role, how does Kagi help with that (or is it more of a personal tool), and do you find it more helpful than something like Google + Claude (what I currently use and love)?

barnabee2• 1 year ago

This is cool.

It’d be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month, too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that gesture.)

llm_trw2• 1 year ago

The one area that'd make kagi thousands of dollars from me and the apps I use would be to lower their APO searches to a sane price.

Currently they charge 2.5c for an API search. This is between 1,000 to 1,000,000 times more than other companies in the space charge.

AI systems need to do dozens of searches for every question to get good results and kagi's results are really good. But not 1,000,000 times better than the competition.

freehorse3• 1 year ago

I love kagi, but indeed I am a bit concerned of long term usefulness/sustainability of their model if they do not manage to reduce their search costs.

llm_trw2• 1 year ago

We are rapidly approaching the point where using an embedding model to run over the whole internet will be the best way to rank search results.

At that point all the special sauce Google et al have spend decades mastering will be worth as much as expertise in analogue computers is today.

nektro• 1 year ago

maybe don't search with an llm

freediver3• 1 year ago

Hi, the API is still work in progress. Expect many more features and lower price once we officialy launch it (next few months)

Vexowsky• 1 year ago

tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.

icar• 1 year ago

I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search engine good at it.

sersi• 1 year ago

That's why I never ended up using ddg. On the other hand I find that kagi is decent enough when I search in French, not as good as English but still better than google.

aacid• 1 year ago

this. I tried so many times to run away from google but I have to come back every time because all search engines are extremely anglo-centric (or maybe rather US centric) and really don't care about other localizations.

dgellow• 1 year ago

German results are reasonable if I select Germany as a region

cyberax• 1 year ago

Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less problematic.

That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness subscription.

jeff_vader• 1 year ago

When most of services nowadays seem like a hostile subscription, this brings joy.

edit: use of Yandex on the other hand.. yeah that's a no go for paid subscription.

butterNaN• 1 year ago

They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!

bugtodiffer3• 1 year ago

Maybe introduce a security team instead of building a browser and email on top of your search

ykonstant2• 1 year ago

Care to elaborate? Comments like this are not helpful for people outside of whichever loop you are in, and people in the loop already know what you are alluding to.

bugtodiffer3• 1 year ago

They have 0 people knowing security stuff, but think they are capable of writing a browser or email service.

wtmt• 1 year ago

I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out compared to most others who’d just take money even if the service is unused.

I’m not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year prices for family duo and family are quite high for many geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able to provide affordable plans.

sedatk• 1 year ago

The Ultimate tier comes with an AI assistant that has access to Claude 3.5, GPT 4o, DeepSeek R1, and so forth. It basically comes down to almost free for me.

xigoi• 1 year ago

https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing/5

rpastuszak• 1 year ago

Balsamiq does something similar with their subscriptions: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/auto-hibernate-subscription...

I think it’s a good balance between locking the user into your product and dealing with the cost of a constantly evolving service.

wiether3• 1 year ago

Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting credits if you don't use them in the current month. But there's a catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused credits are lost.

A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription for 18 months before realizing what they lost.

BossingAround4• 1 year ago

Oh wow, thanks for this, had no idea there's a credit limit.

More annoying to me is that you have to use up your credits before cancelling your sub. If you have credits and you cancel your sub, you lose the credits.

wiether3• 1 year ago

Yeah, once I discovered that, I basically bought the first six audibooks in my wishlist with the credits I had left and cancelled the subscription

gaazoh2• 1 year ago

Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out

* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your

* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.

* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.

lostlogin6• 1 year ago

What search engine do you use?

gaazoh2• 1 year ago

Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.

wiether3• 1 year ago

User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users to keep their subscription going

Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they can bring to the company through ads/affiliations

[0] https://kagifeedback.org/

Havoc• 1 year ago

The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible. Which can’t really be said for google and friends

jorams• 1 year ago

I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out

You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.

As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.

promiseofbeans6• 1 year ago

To be fair, privacy policies are worthless. They could have a squeaky clean privacy policy and still collect data on you illegally. I did request a copy of all my data under the relevant consumer law for where I live, and it looked like they weren't collecting anything they shouldn't^. That's still not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.

^ They did still have a copy of all my old assistant threads, including deleted ones, but a mate who works there says that was just a bug with the system and should have been fixed. This was about a year ago.

rkangel2• 1 year ago

I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that Kagi was worth it to me.

I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old. Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.

It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to a FB post (I don't post often).

benhurmarcel• 1 year ago

I don't trust the product's ability to stay around

Why does it matter for a search engine? It's not a tool in which you store your data and need to be stable.

You use it now, when it's available. If one day it stops being available, or stops being good, then you stop using it. Nothing lost compared to not having used it in the first place.

jjice2• 1 year ago

I don't trust the product's ability to stay around.

I also generally have this mindset, but I've come to think of it through the lens of me getting a better experience for a while and going back down to what I had before vs having never had that better experience.

Before I paid for Kagi I worried "what if it's great and then they go under?" But then I'd just go back to Google and move on, having never had that better search experience. I guess it's kind of like "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" Except that quote seems a bit over dramatic for a search engine...

padolsey• 1 year ago

It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank you - you've got a new signup :)

pmkary• 1 year ago

Awesome Kagi, always the awesome Kagi.

s_dev2• 1 year ago

I will sign back up for a paid service when funding Russian search engine Yandex is dropped. Many like to forget there is a war.

ranguna• 1 year ago

Sources?

cuu5082• 1 year ago

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

id00• 1 year ago

That's definitely an interesting hill to die on. I can say as a paid Kagi user and regular donator to ВСУ

s_dev2• 1 year ago

I'm not dying on any hill. I will sign back up for a €20 euro a month niche search engine when either the war ends or Kagi remove Yandex from their funding list.

vindex10• 1 year ago

It's ЗСУ (Збройні Сили України) in Ukrainian

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B9...

gspr• 1 year ago

Exactly. I've used the free tier a bit. I'd say it's never worse than Google, and sometimes significantly better. I'll happily pay a bit for this. But no way am I paying a single cent for anything where a significant part of what makes it work is Russian.

Glory and liberty for Ukraine!

Gareth3212• 1 year ago

We all have our red lines to draw. I personally use Kagi because it doesn't censor results from politically contentious sources like Yandex. Quite the opposite.

cuu5082• 1 year ago

The problem, for me, is not censoring/not censoring sources like Yandex. The problem is them sharing profit with Yandex.

tokai• 1 year ago

Ah I was just looking into trying a subscription. Can't see how supporting genocide financially is impartiality.

piyuv• 1 year ago

Do you use any American tech companies? There’s another war, FYI

roenxi2• 1 year ago

An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up search history with an account in the financial system which adds failures not present when using something like Google or DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto here that isn't obvious at first glance.

frereubu2• 1 year ago

Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.

https://kagi.com/privacy

roenxi2• 1 year ago

Google: Don't be Evil. Although I'm having some trouble finding a reference on their website to back that up.

If you're going to start trusting search engine companies then maybe don't have them linked to your bank account. They can put what they like in a policy document but the problem is what happens when they decide to start doing things differently.

dizhn3• 1 year ago

Real privacy oriented solutions REMOVE their ABILITY to keep your data. This is the reason I will probably never use Kagi. I am not logging into a search engine. Period. (I know this is futile,but it's the principle of the thing. And I don't want this to be more commonplace than it already is.)

leokennis• 1 year ago

I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited pricing.

For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium e-mail and a premium task manager.

What makes web search so expensive?

gkbrk3• 1 year ago

How do you stream millions of songs per month when there is 43,200 minutes in a month?

If what you mean is you can pick from their library of millions of songs, Kagi sounds like an even better deal. For $10 a month you can search 400 billion web pages.

permo-w2• 1 year ago

for $0 a month you can search 400 billion web pages on any other search engine with an adblocker. if Spotify's business model was "we're going to charge you $120 a year to show you otherwise free and ad-free content more efficiently", they'd be face down in the pool, and rightly so.

I would love to pay for kagi, but the $5 tier would give me search anxiety and $10 is cheeky as fuck. I appreciate that charging per search is a less stable business model than monthly tiers, but it would have made me a customer a long time ago.

carlosjobim7• 1 year ago

It's not that Kagi is expensive at all. It is that your streaming services and premium e-mail service are incredibly cheap. Can you name a few things which you can purchase in your local supermarket that brings you the same value for $10?

permo-w2• 1 year ago

the value of a paid online service is not "how useful is it in a vacuum?", it's "how much more effective is it than a free competitor?"

kagi's value is "how much more effective is it than using google with an adblocker?"

getting the value of the only search engine in the world at the supermarket for $10 would be a challenge. getting the value of "improved search results" is absolutely trivial. you could keep yourself alive for many days with $10. for $0 you can use google with an adblocker.

neoromantique2• 1 year ago

A reminder that Kagi still uses Yandex under the hood so part of money is going to Russia.

No thank you.

hnlurker22• 1 year ago

Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?

dagurp• 1 year ago

I think you're talking about Choice-supportive bias.

I don't know why you're throwing this out here without anything to support it.

gabrielgio• 1 year ago

Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi.

It is paid service, what is the other option? People that don't use the service being happy with it?

because their brain wants to justify them paying for search

It is search engine, not candy crush. No one wants to pay for searching, if they do it is because they find it useful. It is not their brain gets a shot of dopamine every time they do a search on it.

reddalo• 1 year ago

I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four" describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced products, so they must love them in order not to feel like "idiots".

Unearned5161• 1 year ago

You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect making you think that the people on the other side of the fence are delusional.

Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on the other side.

The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...

paulfharrison• 1 year ago

It could also be that the aspect of personality that causes people to think Kagi is better also causes those people to buy it.

mbix775• 1 year ago

I will never support the Russian invaders. I will happily subscribe to your service if you drop Yandex. Until then, hell no.

efilife• 1 year ago

Dod Yandex invade someone?

cianmm• 1 year ago

Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd page.

Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to Google.

zorked2• 1 year ago

You have to switch the country yourself. It does not get more local than country. Local searches are a weakness in Kagi, yes.

rkangel2• 1 year ago

I use it in England and I've had no problem with this at all.

Out of curiosity I just tried the same search, and all the results I get are for .ie domains, so it looks to be working correctly.

mjlee• 1 year ago

Yes, and there's a dropdown so you can easily pick a country other than the one you're in.

eth0up• 1 year ago

Not anti Kagi, but..

Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know, but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn conversations with the pariah professor.

If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet. That hag is oppressing me, damn her!

Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to feel.

"It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being, gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he contracted from that robotic concubine store.

He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning to dissolve and he knew it was time.

An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay Later!" it hissed.

In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the hovering being's pulsating third eye.

And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again, with will and self definition.

Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and his balls were screaming.

zuzulo• 1 year ago

I use Kagi since 6 months, and it's the best experience i've ever had with a search engine.

pointlessone• 1 year ago

Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

I love this - the world needs more of it.

Last time I checked in on this, Kagi was bootstrapped. The single biggest motivation for me to make a bootstrapped business, is to make an ethicals busines.

This includes ethical pricing, ethical communication, and ethical UX.

promiseofbeans6• 1 year ago

They took a little investor money, then spent a big chunk of it on t-shirts lol: https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

percevalve3• 1 year ago

I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.

A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.

According to the study, this affected about 30% of users. So, could offering something like fair pricing reduce this barrier and increase new subscriptions by 30%? https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/sophisticated-consu...

benrutter• 1 year ago

That's really interesting as a concept. As one random person on the internet (not a sample) I definitely avoid services that look like they'll be a pain to unsubscribe from, and will be much more likely to try out a free trial of something if it looks like an easy one to cancel. Super interesting that some people are trying to factor in that things into wider-scale enomics.

percevalve3• 1 year ago

Same here, hence why I remembered it (even if it is from 2022), it did resonate so much with my own experience.

klabb3• 1 year ago

Yeah such are race to the bottoms. Because some assholes did turn cancelation into a Kafkaesque nightmare, now people don't want to subscribe in the first place. Who could have seen that coming? Genius MBA logic. And now honest businesses are in the shitter for it.

wongarsu2• 1 year ago

Seeing how much revenue subscription services make from inactive customers (and how much I have paid over my lifetime to services I no longer used) people don't overestimate this at all. If anything, users still underestimate it.

The disconnect between the researchers and people's actual estimations is that "cancelling a service" is much harder than the couple button clicks it usually takes. You have a structural problem: If you don't use a service, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's easy to cancel something if you make a conscious decision to stop using something. But if it just gradually falls out of use, your only reminder that you should cancel it are your bank statements or the occasional payment reminder email (that some services avoid sending for exactly this reason).

percevalve3• 1 year ago

Basically that is what this study went into great length to measure, at least the way I understand it.

nosioptar• 1 year ago

As someone who often doesn't subscribe because I don't want to get NYTed into having to pick up the phone to cancel, no this approach to pricing wouldn't change things for me.

What does work for me is when the service's docs have a very clear page on how to cancel the service without having to talk to someone.

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

Introducing Fair Pricing

This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you generally want to put in your customers' heads.

p3rls• 1 year ago

What my mind went to, how could someone forget to use a search engine, especially one that is supposedly so much better than Google for a whole month?

AiAi2• 1 year ago

I guess... Still a positive thing that they are trying to make their product/service more "fair", and are progressing in a good direction?

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I mean it's a positive move, I suppose (though, if this is a _common_ thing, then they have other problems, because clearly the people involved aren't using it as a search engine), but it's a strange way to market it.

whereismyacc• 1 year ago

I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?

stuartjohnson12• 1 year ago

Took this opportunity to become a paying customer. Thank you Kagi. I pray that your sadly inevitable enshittification can be warded off.

AiAi2• 1 year ago

It would be great if they consider power purchasing parity to make the service more accessible for developing countries.

tossandthrow2• 1 year ago

My impression is that pricing of kagi is already close to cost price (plus salaries).

I think we are entering an era, where these things will just not be available to people in developing countries, as they cost more than they can pay. Especially taking Ai into consideration.

However, we could start paying fair prices for produce like clothes.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences?

I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not adapting?

z645• 1 year ago

I would say there are three major factors:

1. We have a diverse set of upstream sources. It would require all of them to be "compromised" for our results to completely tank.

2. We have a "crawler-lite" that solely collects info on page quality - number of ads/trackers detected, page speed, etc. - and we take that into account when ranking the results, generally nudging them down the page if "cleaner" ones can be found.

3. Our sole source of income is our users, and we actively respond to impacts in search quality that our users submit to us on our feedback form. If they are not happy with the results quality, then we are out of business.

Put simply: Our technology and business model is completely aligned to resist "enshittification". We have no reason to bias results or "sell out" to anyone.

With the momentum we've gathered, we are also taking first steps to building our own full scale index[1], both as a valuable contribution to the ecosystem of search and a contingency to reduce our reliance on 3rd parties.

[1]: Help us build it! https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html

eitland3• 1 year ago

Tangentially related:

Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite.

So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else".

So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "every input".

Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).

So here are the results from Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+so...

For me Google says:

  > No results found for "Every input is best at something ".
  > Results for Every input is best at something (without quotes):

Meanwhile Kagi gives me a few relevant results:

https://kagi.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+somethin...

So now, while Kagi has always been a lot better at not including unwanted results, it now seems it also has a larger effective index than Google.

KomoD2• 1 year ago

I get 2 results from that Kagi link and they're both what I'd consider to be spam.

eitland3• 1 year ago

But they are there, and they are real, and they don't drown out any better results.

louthy2• 1 year ago

I get three results. Top one is this thread on HN!

wongarsu2• 1 year ago

Three now, one of them this thread.

I'm not sure I'd agree the other two are spam. One of them is a plain-text transcript of some sharepoint files that mentions the quote and attributes them to the same person. The other is the same powerpoint, but in its original on some slide sharing website.

In many cases, either would be a great result. Here it still gives us the direct quote and confirms that all the way back in 2013 somebody attributed it to the same guy. That's a great lead if you try to track down the origin of a quote. If you cared enough you could now contact the person who made the slides to track the quote further.

promiseofbeans6• 1 year ago

As I understand it, they aggregate and re-rank results from Google, Bing, Yandex, Brave, (more?), plus their own index.

loehnsberg• 1 year ago

I don‘t understand why this is bad. Aggregation is a feature because it allows to be no worse than Google, in my experience likely better, and you pay for search with money and not with data.

forty• 1 year ago

Paying for good search sounds interesting to me. It's there such thing but without AI stuff?

louthy2• 1 year ago

You can disable Kagi’s AI answer feature in the settings. But, personally, I find it extremely effective. If I want an AI answer I put a ‘?’ at the end of my query, if I don’t use a ‘?’ then I get a regular search engine set of results. Really simple UX.

The AI answers all have references too.

i5heu• 1 year ago

Looks like I am a kagi customer now.

What a bold and genius move.

pseudocomposer2• 1 year ago

This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers and love it! So this won’t save me a dime (which is still totally cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay for them but rarely, if ever, use them).

I also really like this model for subscription services in general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix (though really, I’m looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months when you don’t use the service. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be hard for companies to implement, and could potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like the EU or the CA state government.

nonethewiser• 1 year ago

Its good and they deserve credit for it. Let me be clear on that.

Now, wouldnt it be even better to implement usage based pricing with a maximum that's equal to the current subscription?

I dont know the Kagi details. Say you pay 10/month and each search is $0.02. You pay max(search_count * 0.02, 10).

I guess the logic is much simpler for their current system. It's 10/month, period. Then if you didnt search anything you get a refund. Instead of tracking and calculating usage.

However, usage pricing should be more enticing for casual users. With the statement refund for 0 use, there is now an incentive for infrequent users to NOT to use the product.

pseudocomposer2• 1 year ago

I think metered pricing makes sense for a service that's $10/mo (which the base Kagi w/ AI features is).

However, Kagi search unlimited is $5/mo. And, especially because of the whole "payment providers taking their cut" thing, I'd argue for services that are $5/mo or under, metered pricing doesn't really make sense.

Finally, I'd argue that this approach has other advantages over metering, even for higher-cost services:

* It's easier for devs to implement. Just one search needs to be recorded a month for an audit trail, rather than all search history.

* Keeping a search history for users is not needed at all, really (or, again, at most, one search per month). It's much better for user privacy.

* Most countries/states would have much more luck passing legislation forcing companies to implement this than metering, as well as enforcing it.

ilrwbwrkhv• 1 year ago

Another win for Kagi. Companies like Kagi, Valve win by just being nice. Can't stop winning.

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

Wow, awesome. If everybody did this I could stop charging my credit card number every 6 months.

daft_pink• 1 year ago

It’s nice that they are in a position that they can do this. I use Kagi every day.

neves• 1 year ago

Does it mean that if someone dies they won't need to cancel the service?

ryukafalz• 1 year ago

This actually makes me a lot more likely to sign up for Kagi! I've been hearing good things about it so I've been interested, but these days I'm very subscription-averse because there's just so dang many of them. But only paying for it if I actually use it makes signing up lower risk. (I know myself well enough to know that there's a good chance I forget to cancel otherwise.)

edude03• 1 year ago

I don't understand people who would use kagi (or any search engine) sparringly. If you're already willing to shell out money for a replacement, why wouldn't you use it all the time?

a12k• 1 year ago

I am hyper aggressive about cutting monthly services. If I don’t feel I am getting value, or can get the value from somewhere else with a little more work, I cut it. For example I would never, ever pay for YouTube Premium. This has led to a pretty disciplined set of monthly services and low cost. Kagi though is one of the most useful services I have and goes way above and beyond this bar, so keep it around.

To ape someone else’s lament: I can’t take advantage of this because I use it daily.

ajyey• 1 year ago

I use YouTube every day of my life and gladly pay premium. It costs money to host and serve the insane amount of video YouTube provides. To each his own

dewey• 1 year ago

Same, it’s my most used streaming service and it also feels good to support creators a little bit while also not having ads on my TV / app where ad blocking is harder.

zOneLetter• 1 year ago

Well, this tipped the scale, and I just subscribed. Honestly, so refreshing to have a normal search engine after 2 years of nonstop AI crap thrown at my face.

dax_• 1 year ago

Uhm.. Kagi has plenty of AI features. :) To be fair, you can turn them off if you wish.

maelito• 1 year ago

Still no revision of the Yandex partenership. Spending money on Kagi is spending some on Yandex, owned by the Russian terrorist state.

linsomniac2• 1 year ago

I would have purchased several services over the years if they had a pricing like this, which ultimately I did not (because they did not). In particular there was some video editing software for $20/mo, but I knew I'd probably go months between using it. I'd have gladly paid $20/mo when using it, but it would stick in my craw the months I didn't use it.

tuhriel2• 1 year ago

When the whole SaaS stuff started to pop up as buzzword I actually believed that it would work that way.

You don't pay some heavy license fees for a local installation anymore, but get a login where you get billed a specific amount if you use it that day/week/month etc. I was pretty sad when I saw how it got implemented...

linsomniac2• 1 year ago

You're right, but the software I mention above was some locally-installed software with a SaaS-like pricing.

tstocker• 1 year ago

What happens when you cancel subscription with a lot of unused credit ?

z645• 1 year ago

It just uses Stripe credit under the hood. So as long as you still have an account registered with us (active subscription or not), you can use that credit to resubscribe any time - or use it on other things, like API credits, or gift codes.

whalesalad• 1 year ago

this is cool but .. is it really worth a big announcement? who is paying for kagi and not using it for an entire month?

wenbin• 1 year ago

It’s great to see more companies adopting fair pricing models.

The first time I encountered this was with Slack—they only charge for active users.

We follow a similar approach with our products : 1) PodcastAPI.com - If no API requests are made within a month, the user pays $0. 2) website Premium Membership- rather than forcing users to pay a monthly fee, we allow them to buy a 2-day pass with one time payment (default option) - listennotes.com/premium

Caveat: customers will demand more. soon, they’ll request for hourly fair pricing - don’t charge me for those hours that i don’t use your service!

MrOxiMoron• 1 year ago

Can I get this on my Netflix, Disney+, whatever too pls?

m_kos2• 1 year ago

A little Kagi nitpick (off-topic): I contributed a few translations when Kagi was in beta. Then, Kagi introduced a subscription which was too pricey for my budget, so I stopped using it. Nevertheless, Kagi has kept emailing me to contribute even more free translations.

Kagi team, folks say you have a great product, but if you don't pay attention to small issues like this one, you are bound to lose some of your goodwill.

freediver3• 1 year ago

We are definetely not emailing you, it could be the service we use to crowdsource translations (localazy). I suggest removing the account from there or check their settings? (as we do not have control over these emails)

m_kos2• 1 year ago

This is a very disappointing reply.

Anyway, yes, they come from a service you are using with the subject line "[Kagi Search] There Are Some Untranslated Phrases." I know how to unsubscribe or reroute emails to my spam folder.

siliconc0w• 1 year ago

Every service provider should be obligated to do this. I'd bet there are tons of phone or Internet plans that have 0 usage

chuckadams• 1 year ago

Just raising my hand as another who would sign up, but for that whole Yandex thing.

Imnimo• 1 year ago

Is this happening a lot? I definitely don't have any months where I make zero web searches. I'm not even sure I have individual days where I make zero web searches. Are a lot of Kagi customers going on month-long trips into the rainforest or something?

miki123211• 1 year ago

Now I just wish there was a way to purchase Kagi credits.

I'd happily pay a one-time fee for a 1000-search package that would be added to my 100 free searches.

jjice2• 1 year ago

The thing I appreciate most about Kagi is their "Quick Answer" option. Suffixing a question mark on a query to give me a high quality, cited RAG (?) AI summary has been such a nice option for quick answers.

paradox460• 1 year ago

They say billing cycle, but what if I'm on the annual plan? Is my cycle a year? Or does my renewal date get pushed back a month if I don't use it?

I use kagi hundreds of times a day, so it's not something likely to happen soon, but I'm still curious

sizzle• 1 year ago

Someone please convince me to use Kagi. What makes it superior to Google for you?

bryanmgreen• 1 year ago

A good chunk of inflation is just price gouging, in today's modern world.

There are more tools to understand data and squeeze every penny from customers.

It's admirable when a company isn't trying to bleed customers dry.

mystified50162• 1 year ago

Is there any concern that this results in a negative feedback loop of "oh, I better not use Kagi for this one random thing, it'll cost a whole month's subscription"?

Maybe a threshold of a dozen searches or so before the subscription fee kicks in.

stevage• 1 year ago

It seems "fair" but, if they even make a single search in that month, you charge them the full monthly fee.

Real "fair" pricing just charges per request, and has the per-request pricing progressively go down as they reach various thresholds. Preferably with a free tier.

larrybolt• 1 year ago

This feels like an example of a company trying to do the "right thing" and deciding there must be a way to monetize that, regarding what everyone (even the web) is telling them.

Imagine the balance of revenue from non-returning users (think fitness) vs very heavy users, and finding a way to keep both parties happy. And the implications it has (those "paused" users still count towards "onboarded" users).

Major props Kagi team, or who-ever pushed this idea!

sma3in• 1 year ago

Good pricing approach that I think lots of companies should start adopting. But I just can't wrap my head around paying for my online searches. self hosting a free service like SearXNG will forever my go to option for privacy and security

Fair Pricing

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