Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

https://blog.kagi.com/assistant-for-all

by angilr • 1 year ago

491 275 1 year ago

blog.kagi.com

viraptor5• 1 year ago

If the staff sees this - please stop preventing zoom. Not only is that bad for accessibility, it makes the article less useful for everyone - there's a screenshot included showing off the feature, but it's too small to read on the phone and I can't zoom in.

scary-size• 1 year ago

I can zoom just fine on mobile Safari.

PKop• 1 year ago

So what?

His complaint is easily verifiable, and valid:

catlikesshrimp• 1 year ago

I can zoom in

Android 14 Firefox 136.0.1 (Build #2016078447), hg-e7956a4db6c5+ GV: 136.0.1-20250310180126 AS: 136.0

ublock origin enable zoom in all websites

Edit: I know this is not what you are asking for, but try opening the image in a new tab. Can you zoom in there?

https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2025-04-17/1744906741-...

viraptor5• 1 year ago

Yeah, I know the workarounds. This is more of a "complain publicly to maybe fix this specific case, but mostly raise awareness for people who will build the next thing".

dean2432• 1 year ago

This has been bugging me as well.

Hasnep• 1 year ago

Firefox on Android has an accessibility setting called "Zoom on all web sites" that gets around this. Firefox's reader mode would help with this as well.

It's a shame we need these workarounds instead of all websites being accessible by default :/

cma2• 1 year ago

The original android browser had something much better, zoom until the size was right, double tap to reflow to fit

viraptor5• 1 year ago

That's amazing! I'm already on FF on Android and didn't realise they introduced it. Thank you so much. I'll finally be able to see the small images on medium and substack!

kevincox• 1 year ago

Unfortunately there is no per-site override. So you get to the occasional site that you don't want to zoom (like a game where the zoom gesture does something in-game) that is unusable with this global setting enabled :(

GrayShade• 1 year ago

You can open it in a new tab and zoom there.

jeffhuys• 1 year ago

What browser prevents this actually? None of the browsers (even mobile) I just quickly tested just... worked? No extensions.

jddj• 1 year ago

I think Safari just outright ignores the maximum-scale property.

freediver5• 1 year ago

I can look into it. Can you clarify what you mean? Article zooms in normally for me (Orion browser/iOS).

ilt• 1 year ago

OP might have meant that pinch and zoom is locked in and that’s why they can’t zoom into that screenshot?

Edit: I can zoom in perfectly in my browser - Safari on iPhone - here.

viraptor5• 1 year ago

It's blocked on Firefox on Android. Another comment quoted the meta tag which disables it.

setsewerd• 1 year ago

Not sure if you mean you work at Kagi, but I also want to add that when opening the Android app, the splash page takes a full second or so to load before the search bar opens, which doesn't sound like much but it makes it harder to habitually use Kagi as my default mobile search.

The Kagi widget technically solves this, but without installing a new launcher I can't replace the native Google search bar with the Kagi one.

seth_at_kagi2• 1 year ago

Hey - One of our engineers has fixed this. Please try again!

jacobwinters• 1 year ago

Kagi employee here. I hate it when sites block zooming. Didn't realize our blog was doing it :S

Our site's been fixed, and I opened a PR upstream.

blissofbeing• 1 year ago

It would be nice if all models where available on every plan too.

shinryuu• 1 year ago

Second that. Given that they have their fair use policy it should be in their interest as well I would believe since they have a baked in margin.

AlotOfReading2• 1 year ago

That would eliminate the one differentiating feature on the (presumably) highest margin plan they have.

Moving to a pay-as-you-go model across all their plans might be interesting, but could equally give the wrong impression to some audiences given that it's a pricing strategy usually reserved for budget brands in the consumer space and tends to scare people off.

jjmarr• 1 year ago

If you try openrouter you'll see why they have to charge $25/month for the best models. Pay per use and you'll intuitively feel the price.

Valodim• 1 year ago

They give more for free, and your only thought is "sure would be nice if they gave even more for free"?

maronato4• 1 year ago

Honestly, everything should be free, and they could just make money from ads (which I’d block with my ad blocker).

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

would be nice if all models where available on every plan too

Would be nice if I had a lay-flat intercontinental jet.

C4stor• 1 year ago

The "fair use" part takes a lot of place in this article.

It talks a lot about what happens if you use more tokens than what you're allowed, but curiously doesn't pip a word about what happens if you use less - for example maybe with a partial rebate on your next billing cycle ?

I think "fair" should mean "fair for all parties involved", currently it's rather a "we don't want to incur any risk" policy, since I don't see how it's fair for my end of the contract. I'd rather pay for my actual usage at any other provider than pay for min(actual usage, 25$) at Kagi.

jen729w2• 1 year ago

As an existing happy subscriber to Kagi, this statement is illogical.

I currently pay for x. Soon I’ll get x + y for the same money.

That’s better.

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

"As an existing happy subscriber" -- goodness! Even after years of seeing what happens after such illogical evangelism, hn never ceases to surprise you and brings the fandom out in full force. It's like with Apple. You say once "your phone switches on and off on its own - maybe something is amiss with the hw/sw" and there are dozens of replies already blaming you "you must be holding it wrong!". It's a whole new level of apologism.

baobabKoodaa10• 1 year ago

I am also an existing happy subscriber to Kagi. I currently pay for unlimited X. Now I pay for limited X, where I can't even see if I'm approaching limits or not. Anyway, my main point is that I'm getting LESS for the same money.

Phenomenit2• 1 year ago

Yeah I concur.

As an early adopter I first got forced off my grandfather plan to the regular one(at least I got a T-shirt). Now I have a limited number of searches that I have to keep track of and this has made me only use Kagi if necessary. This has dropped my number of searches significantly but at the end of the year I’m still being charged for renewing my plan even though I haven’t used a quarter of my allotted searches.

I don’t care about LLMs so this brings nothing of value to me. Give me an email account or some backup storage and open source office suite and I would be willing to pay and pay more.

I’m seriously considering not re-newing my subscription for the first time in ages.

NoahKAndrews• 1 year ago

The $10 plan has unlimited searches again.

mdhen• 1 year ago

How do you use kagi and not know the basic plan has unlimited searches and has had it for ages?

mkayokay2• 1 year ago

Then don't renew. Nobody is forcing you to pay for the service, and from what you wrote, it sounds like the service is not what you need/want (anymore).

mediumsmart• 1 year ago

That is a fair point. Considering the alternatives and realities Kagi is way too cheap for the life improvement it provides.

maronato4• 1 year ago

It’s the exact opposite. They are incurring a huge amount of risk with this.

6 hours ago most users didn’t have access to this feature at all. Now we have $4-8 of raw token credits a month to use on a well-built feature.

I’m paying $9 a month with the annual subscription, and it was worth it just for Search. Now they’re giving me $17 worth of value for the same price.

Their margins must be razor thin, and they’re only able to offer this much value because they’re counting on most people not using all credits. If everyone did, or if they gave rebates, they’d go out of business.

dawnerd• 1 year ago

Probably a lot of subscribers that will never use it, like myself.

RichardLake• 1 year ago

The other point of view is that they are now forcing users to pay for both search and AI, even if they do not want to use or fund the development of the later. You used to be paying 9$ for search, now you are paying 9$ - x for search and an unknown amount for AI.

zuzulo2• 1 year ago

Is it fair enough to ask your favorite restaurant to lower the bill because you didn't eat the two last franch fries ?

onli3• 1 year ago

If it's a subscription and someone else can eat the fries, of course?

nirvdrum2• 1 year ago

Huh? The title of the blog post is "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users!". Their users are people paying for what up until now was just their search service. They're now rolling in Assistant as a value-add. Your subscription price didn't increase. You're strictly getting more for what you were already paying. If you don't use it all, you're no worse off than you were yesterday.

If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something together with Open WebUI pretty easily.

I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would have been convenient if they could occasionally access Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.

ericrallen2• 1 year ago

It’s probably worth noting that they do offer a refund of your subscription price if you don’t perform searches in a given month, which is pretty much the opposite of how every other company with a subscription works.

It wasn’t a day one feature, so there’s some chance that a thing like this could roll out.

The article probably focuses on the overage because that’s what most users are going to be concerned about.

Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests of their users and balance that against making enough money to keep existing.

This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.

m1keil2• 1 year ago

Anyone used both Kagi assistant and perplexity and can share how was the experience?

greatgib2• 1 year ago

I don't use the Kagi assistant yet, just the kind of AI response in search results. But regarding perplexity, I'm a little bit disappointed.

I started to use Perplexity like 1 or 1.5 years ago when it was really good in term of efficiency to find good results with an efficient interface, compared to chatgpt and co. But nowadays I find the assistant response to be not that good at all, with a lot of the links provided or the suggested follow up questions on the same quality as Google SEO top results or ads.

Despite having the paid plan or Perplexity, most of the time I try a request there and then still go to chatgpt or mistral to ask the question again.

For Kagi, when I use the in search ai response, it is mostly good directly.

dabbz• 1 year ago

If you hit `a` in the search results page it'll take you to a chat interface to better grok the AI in a conversational format. Not exactly the same as perplexity still, but more ChatGPT akin. There's also a continue in assistant button at the bottom of the summary results to chat more with the query.

You can also go straight to the view by visiting `/assistant` and typing your query in there.

I still think preplexity has the AI search stuff down better, but getting both a "legacy style" search AND AI search, Kagi has better value to me imo.

loehnsberg2• 1 year ago

I use both but cancelled my Perplexity subscription.

Kagi is the better version of Google search, especially if you learn how to use lenses, bangs, and all these features. Kagi Assistant is great if you‘re happy with basic no-frills chat, i.e. no usable voice input, no image gen, no canvas.

Perplexity is not bad, but somewhat stuck in the middle between ChatGPT/Gemini and search. They provide sources for search results which are somewhat more spot-on than what I‘ve seen elsewhere. For example it could find EV chargers with restaurants for a trip I made along a route, which ChatGPT, Gemini, Kagi Assist failed greatly).

I found refining searches with Perplexity terse and it kept forgetting context once you started to reply. They have an AI generated news feed which lured me into more doom scrolling.

Also, be aware that Perplexity free-tier may collect data about you, which Kagi does not.

Tldr; Kagi is a superior search engine worth paying for. Perplexity seems good at queries that require context but quite expensive.

mjamesaustin2• 1 year ago

Any suggestions for how you got your lenses, bangs, assistant set up the way you like? I recently subscribed to Kagi and feel like I don't really know how to get in the habit of really using all the features.

spooneybarger• 1 year ago

I use both. I only pay for Kagi because I have many models I can use and I can set up different contexts to use them in.

I rarely use Kagi search anymore and instead search via assistant. Both it and perplexity give me much better results than I get from a traditional search engine.

I've never been great at getting what I want from search engines. With assistant and perplexity, I type plain English with context and get what I am looking for a large chunk of the time. That's a godsend to me.

I've found things that assistant does that make it worth paying for. I often use perplexity but what I use it for (deep research) isn't valuable enough at the time to pay for.

I like the perplexity iOS app a lot and use it almost exclusively on my phone which isn't enough use to necessitate needing a subscription.

Zambyte3• 1 year ago

Just typed this up elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726582

m1keil2• 1 year ago

Examples were useful to visualise the difference, thanks.

mbesto• 1 year ago

I tried both and use Perplexity. Perplexity is much more akin to native ChatGPT in which I can create "spaces" for my projects. For example, I just bought an RV and so I loaded up all of the PDF manuals into a space so the LLM can reference those things. Since a few months ago, Kagi is just thread based.

FYI - I use Kagi every day for standard search and love it.

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

Perplexity aggressively makes shit up, particularly when it comes to science and finance. It provides sources, so you can check the bullshit, but I’m the error rate is so high that it’s practically dangerous.

tiltowait• 1 year ago

I've subscribed to Kagi for 2 years and subscribed to Perplexity for 2 months. I liked Perplexity a lot—in particular, I think its search AI search is faster and maybe a little better than Kagi's. But the lack of standard search and not being able to do non-search AI work led me to drop it and just keep Kagi. And then Kagi released Ki, their multi-step assistant, which is close to as good.

rubslopes• 1 year ago

I’m a Perplexity subscriber, but I’ve decided to favor Kagi. One issue I have with Perplexity is the lack of control over the search timeframes. With Kagi, I can use my own timeframe filters, such as last 2 days, last week, and last month.

colonial2• 1 year ago

A note on our fair-use policy
Basically our policy states that you can use AI models based on your plan’s value.

Although I likely won't use Assistant, stuff like this is why I love Kagi. My relationship with them as a customer feels refreshingly transparent; I can't think of any other consumer SaaS provider that automatically answers my reflexive "how does this make money?" question.

(Compare, say, Discord. It's best in class, but eternally unprofitable - which makes me wary that it might fold or go to hell at the drop of a hat.)

weird-eye-issue3• 1 year ago

I've paid for a monthly subscription with Discord for years

They also have ads in the app and they have other monetization features...

colonial2• 1 year ago

Revenue != profit. Discord, like almost every 2010s SaaS startup, has revenue (from your Nitro) - but not nearly enough to cover expenses.

basch7• 1 year ago

The thing still giving me pause is a lack of "bring your own model connection" between saas uh services.

If I already pay for Gemini Advanced (or OpenAI/ChagtGPT Pro), I then have to pay for it again at every service that offers a Pro 2.5 (or 4.1/4o) tier. I should be able to connect my Gemini Advanced access to any service that offers Flash and be able to upgrade. Signing up for a bunch of services is starting to feel like being triple, quadruple or more dipped. Similar to how I am annoyed seeing media content cross licensed to three streaming services and not getting a bill reduction when subscribed to multiple services with the same content.

everforward3• 1 year ago

I doubt that fits in the usage model for those pricing plans. They're priced assuming it's inconvenient and less used because of it. I keep hearing they're losing money anyways, so despite being triple or quadruple dipped you're still paying less than it costs to run the models.

eightysixfour• 1 year ago

I really feel like the software model is going to start to break in a couple of ways in the near future.

Instead of vertical software slices, many people are going to want their single “horizontal” agent that they pay for (e.g Gemini Advanced, Claude) and connectivity to all of their other services.

MCP (which I personally think is a mediocre protocol, so it will probably win) as the glue for a bunch of services we OAUTH against and choose when our agents do/do not have access to certain tools.

The idea of a “GPT” App Store from OpenAI was sort of right, but just wrong enough. We are going to have an App Store inside of our preferred AI platform and subscribe/connect our other services from there.

manquer• 1 year ago

Having a good ethos before significant funding rounds is one thing , it is lot harder once you raise a ton of external money.

It is not big bad VC either, VC funding while demanding is still lot more forgiving than Private equity or public markets . It is nature of a free economy to be as efficient as possible which in turn makes it affordable and accessible to class of users who would not have been do so before .

fhd22• 1 year ago

I wonder why the rollout is specifically over the weekend. I'd personally do something like that Monday to Wednesday rather than Friday to Sunday. It seems like the kind of thing that needs monitoring and quick reactions - can easily get expensive if something goes wrong.

Maxion• 1 year ago

Possible that they see lower usage on weekends.

lucb1e• 1 year ago

They're already limiting it to one country at first. If they want a slower ramp-up, they can show it to more and more users rather than working weekends. Not to rule it out but this would strike me as a strange reason

zuzulo2• 1 year ago

Lower WE usage. "Let's see if it crash"

fhd22• 1 year ago

Hm, maybe not lower per se (though I can believe that), but less critical (less likely to be work related)?

deanc• 1 year ago

On the other hand a huge number of countries have the whole Easter holiday off. Plenty of time to read these articles and sign up to stuff.

ziml772• 1 year ago

Are they really going to need more than a couple people working the weekend to pause/rollback if something goes wrong? It's not like Assistant itself is new, just the broader access is.

xigoi• 1 year ago

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723964

greatgib2• 1 year ago

Obviously I'm happy to benefit from being able to use most model "for free" in my paid non ultimate account.

But I'm concerned that this will not rot the business model like that kind of thing happen for other services.

I would have preferred that the full of my subscription cost goes to the core feature of developing the search engine and directly the related feature. And as of today, I pay a separate premium if I'm interested by the AI assistant.

Now, with it being in all subscriptions, and knowing that anyway they can only work by paying the token price per request to all AI providers, it means less of my money going to the search index improvement, and what I'm more worried is that a forced increased of the subscription price in the coming years.

Something like, as you know, our costs are high, so we need to raise the pricing to stay sustainable.

Even if not the best reference, this remind me of Netflix saying look we are adding "videogames" (that no one wants) to your subscription for free, but now we will have to raise our prices, because you know, inflation and all of that ...

bayindirh• 1 year ago

From my experience, Kagi always prefer to "trickle down" features to lower tiers . First they removed search limits from some plans without increasing the price. Now they're allowing to use the AI assistant, if you want.

The gist is, when you don't use the AI assistant, you still pay the base price, and that money goes to R&D, since your subscription money doesn't go to AI providers in the first place.

For example, I have no interest in AI assistant, and I won't use it. As a result, my support will Kagi won't change.

TekMol5• 1 year ago

"Privacy by default"

I don't know. To me, requiring me to give them my email and then having all my searches associated with that email is the opposite of privacy to me.

Yes, Google, Bing, Perplexity and Co could do fingerprinting and try fuzzy matching to cluster my searches. But at least that would be fuzzy and against the law in many places. While with Kagi, every search of mine would be clearly labeled as coming from me.

dharmab2• 1 year ago

There is a feature where you can search anonymously, using IETF's Privacy Pass standard: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

TekMol5• 1 year ago

That looks super complicated. And hard to tell if the cryptography works as intended.

Why would I go through all that hassle if I can just type my query directly in other search engines?

fancy_pantser• 1 year ago

Maybe their privacy pass is useful then?

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

mrtesthah• 1 year ago

Unfortunately the assistant officially does not work with Privacy Pass, for some inexplicable reason.

flexagoon• 1 year ago

How is requiring an email "the opposite of privacy" when making a one-time disposable email takes like 5 seconds?

Wilder7977• 1 year ago

Don't give them "your" email. Give them a mail alias, which I am sure as a privacy conscious person you already have, and you are good. They also recommend to do so themselves.

However, the most important argument here is not the fact that they are legally bound to those privacy commitments (they are), but that their business incentives are fundamentally incompatible with tracking users. For a very niche business with an extremely narrow and homogeneous user base, if they would get caught doing so, it would be game over. The privacy pass feature is available if you don't trust, and you can verify since everything relevant happens client side.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

I was given a free month of Kagi to test, and it had so many rough edges that during the last days of of the trial I was already using Google again.

Notable issues for me:

- maps (from Mapbox) are really bad. Sluggish performance and lack of information

- barely any info boxes

- no translation feature ("gründonnerstag englisch") gives me links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result

- no timezone calculations: "10 am PT" in Kagi: "= 10 Pt am (metric petaton attometers)" in Google: "10:00 Freitag Pacific Time (PT) entspricht 19:00 Freitag in ..."

- no search history, which is sometimes really useful to have

Other than that, the search results are really good.

bigstrat2003• 1 year ago

Other than that, the search results are really good.

I'm confused why anything else would matter. For example, I'll readily admit that Kagi maps sucks compared to Google maps. But I just use Google for map stuff, and use Kagi for searching. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me that it's a tool which does one thing and does it well.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

Because all these things improve efficiency. They give you the result at one glance.

With good search results I refer to those which normally take you to sites, not just quick lookups like time zone conversion or translations. For example results which point to documentation or GitHub.

msdz• 1 year ago

While I'm aware this is a case of "you're holding it wrong" – !translate <phrase> should do the trick. And that's not an excuse for not having better detection for when an info box should exist, because they do have them, especially for, but not limited to the WolframAlpha integration stuff. (For example, a friend and fellow user was awed when searching "internet speed test" and saw it integrated, no idea if Google has that too though).

Other than that, make sure your region/locale is set correctly (I'm not getting the metric petaton, for example), and for everything else, they have an excellent feedback forum for suggestions/bug reports.

hobofan3• 1 year ago

make sure your region/locale is set correctly

Last time I checked (which admitedly has been a few months, but I haven't seen anything in the changelog/announcements that make me belive things got better), that's not a viable option.

I always keep it as "International" (luckily that's an option!), as setting it to "German" significantly degrades the results as for e.g. technical topics it will rank many rubish German results higher than they should be. Google still has a significant edge in getting the distinction right between regional and technical expertise and how they relate to language.

hobofan3• 1 year ago

I think those are all perfectly valid points. As a Kagi early adopter they don't weigh as heavily that they ultimately make a difference, but it also feels like most things that are not AI related are not receiving that much attention nowadays, which is a bit disheartening to see.

tomjen3• 1 year ago

When did you try it?

Because they have been working on all those issues. They even have their own translation now.

i_love_retros2• 1 year ago

Kagi not saving search history is a big selling point for me. I don't want yet another tech company keeping tabs on me.

And I wouldn't care if they dropped maps, I pay for kagi for search and the assistant.

ziml772• 1 year ago

I feel the same about their maps. I pay for Kagi for search primarily and assistant secondarily. I'm fine getting my maps from a different source. Not every service needs to be an "everything app".

raffael_de2• 1 year ago

- no translation feature ("gründonnerstag englisch") gives me links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result

How about a custom Bang for dict.cc?

Bang shortcut could be "dcc" with URL: https://www.dict.cc/?s=%s.

Then you can translate using "!dcc gründonnerstag".

baobabKoodaa10• 1 year ago

I don't like how this was rolled out. I'm currently paying for "Unlimited Kagi Assistant" and the Kagi website STILL advertises "Unlimited Kagi Assistant". And they stealthily rolled in limits? I pay the same amount, but it's no longer unlimited, and I only know about this because I happened to notice it on HN. Otherwise I would only know after hitting a limit.

louthy5• 1 year ago

Fair-use limitations were always there. It sounds like they weren't actively enforcing it, but now they are because of some problem users. I don't think anything has changed for you unless you're one of the users this refers to:

Q: Why did Kagi start enforcing the fair use policy?

A: The policy was enforced due to excessive use. For instance, the top 10 users accounted for approximately 14% of the total costs, with some individuals consistently using up to 50 million tokens per week on the most advanced models. Our profit margins are already quite narrow. 95% of users should never hit any usage limits.

baobabKoodaa10• 1 year ago

I have no idea if I will be limited or not. I can see I have about 3 million tokens used per month. But I don't know where the limits are.

gaiagraphia4• 1 year ago

I'm really surprised that more people didn't jump on the unlimited usage of Claude3.7, tbh.

Don't think it's fair to call users problematic when they were using the product as advertised. "Unlimited" has a meaning.

mppm• 1 year ago

Maybe they've changed it in the past hour, but as I write this comment the 25$ plan is called "Ultimate" and promises unlimited search, but not unlimited assistant.

I agree about the need for appropriate wording and advertising, but other than that, the new limits seem entirely reasonable and in line with what other aggregators like Abacus and Poe are doing. The paid plans of the major AI labs themselves always have usage limits too. It simply can't work any other way if you include costly models in the mix.

raffael_de2• 1 year ago

Afaiu, with Unlimited you have more tokens available and more models to choose from.

switch007• 1 year ago

It's easier just to never believe a company whenever they say "unlimited". It almost always goes away. And never ever truly unlimited as they all have a legal caveat to terminate your services for whatever reason whenever they like

haroldship5• 1 year ago

How do I get this to work? When I try to access the Assistant I just get the help page: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html

j01• 1 year ago

You have to login first.

For some reason instead of redirecting you to login kagi.com/assistant redirects you to the wiki rather than a login page when you're not logged in.

jacek• 1 year ago

It's right there in the article:

An important note: We are enabling the Assistant for all users in phases, based on regions, starting with USA today. The full rollout for ‘Assistant for All’ is scheduled to be completed by Sunday, 23:59 UTC.

haroldship5• 1 year ago

I missed that, thanks. I will try it on Sunday

louthy5• 1 year ago

Are you outside the US?

Q: I can not access Assistant!

A: We are doing staged rollout beginning with USA, full rollout scheduled by Sunday, 23:59 UTC. This will include other regions and even the trial plan.

haroldship5• 1 year ago

I missed that, thanks. I will try it on Sunday

haroldship5• 1 year ago

Still not working

ohghiZai• 1 year ago

Outside the US as well. You can get it to work now through a VPN. Not all models are available at the moment.

gaiagraphia4• 1 year ago

It'd be nice if you could see how much each request actually cost in relation to your plan, and to have some type of easily accessible meter.

A lot of AI providers operate in black box territory when it comes to limits, which is quite annoying.

moebrowne2• 1 year ago

We plan to display cost and interaction details more prominently soon, potentially on the billing page or directly within the Assistant interface.

I too want to see this soon. As a long time user of Ultimate it isn't uncommon for me to use 5M tokens per month and I have no idea if this will be covered by my subscription now.

cyberpunk• 1 year ago

How do you know how many tokens you've used? Or is it a guesstimate?

aktenlage• 1 year ago

Sounds good. I use duckduckgo's AI assistant a lot these days, which also guarantees that the data is not used.

mocmoc• 1 year ago

Good idea 1 year later. Perplexity is on top of the game

Zambyte3• 1 year ago

I paid for both for close to half a year to see which one I wanted to keep. I decided to drop Perplexity in favor of Kagi, because Perplexity felt like it was trying to position / portray itself as a supernatural-esque Source of Truth, where as Kagi does a better job at letting you use the tools how you want.

Perplexity is also much less flexible than Kagi Assistant. The most customization you can do on Perplexity is answer a few questions about yourself, and hope that the info you add is injected into relevant prompts (spoiler alert: hope isn't very powerful here). With Kagi, I created a lens about a year ago to filter search results down to sources I find useful relating to GNU Guix, which I use for my machines. When Kagi Assistant rolled out (I pay for Ultimate, so I have had this a while) I made an Assistant that only pulls search results from my GNU Guix lens. The practical comparison here between Kagi and Perplexity is that I can go to Kagi and search "!guixc How do I install nginx?" (or simply ask the question in the Assistant interface; the bang will bring me there from search) and I will get back the answer I want. I added info that I use GNU Guix on my Perplexity profile, and there is not a chance that my question would have been answered within the context of GNU Guix as I wanted.

Perplexity is cool, but I found Kagi to simply be more useful.

VHRanger4• 1 year ago

The difference is that Perplexity is subsidized by $0.5B in VC investment and are losing money.

Kagi can only grow at the pace of incoming revenue.

bwb2• 1 year ago

how do you actually get it? none of the links work and I am a paying user...

just takes me to documentation.

moebrowne2• 1 year ago

We are enabling the Assistant for all users in phases, based on regions, starting with USA today. The full rollout for ‘Assistant for All’ is scheduled to be completed by Sunday, 23:59 UTC.

bwb2• 1 year ago

Thanks! I totally missed that, I wish they would announce when it is out rather than when it isn't :)

lolc2• 1 year ago

I've been wanting to try and see whether I can consolidate my phind.com and my kagi.com subs by upgrading my Kagi plan. They are kinda forcing me to try now :-)

lolc2• 1 year ago

I tried, and Kagi is better in some aspects like ease to edit questions. Haven't seen any a downside yet, and the option of creating multiple profiles seems interesting.

shaunpud• 1 year ago

Why the f don't blogs have links to the actual homepage

i_love_retros2• 1 year ago

Kagi are one of my favorite companies. In a world where buying a T-shirt requires me to hand over my phone number ("in case we need to contact you about your order" - yeah, right) I find it so refreshing that kagi barely require any info from me except some form of payment.

dewey• 1 year ago

I had to send them my address…for my free t-shirt ;)

dgellow2• 1 year ago

Great t-shirt quality btw

justinrubek• 1 year ago

At least you got your shirt. I waited for many, many months, where I consistently checked to see if they were out. They happened to release them during a very short window of time in which I didn't go to my email; I never got to have the shirt.

dgellow2• 1 year ago

https://store.kagi.com/

jillyboel• 1 year ago

The shipping companies seem to demand it from the sender.

But they never use it so just fill in a random number.

numpad0• 1 year ago

They do if needed. AliExpress at one point required my address to be in full UTF-8 representation that I wasn't comfortable with, what I assume to have been the post office called me twice without caller ID, and the package got "delivered" to random neighborhood of the airport hundreds of miles away.

They don't call you if you live in a cleanly ASCII representable address with zero ambiguity and you don't have to be contacted from customs. Otherwise the courier do use the number.

yencabulator• 1 year ago

For what it's worth, UPS has called me multiple times when a nearby hill was too slippery for their truck to make it up. I met them at the base of the hill to pick up my package. Your experience != universal experience.

CubsFan10602• 1 year ago

Is there a way to disable this? We have a strict no-ai policy. Even having it available will be an issue and I may not be able to use Kagi at work.

spondyl• 1 year ago

As a user myself, I'm not sure. Assistant is a separate view so it's easy to never interact with it but yeah, I can see why that might be a work policy issue. You could try requesting that as a feature in https://kagifeedback.org. The team are quite responsive there and historically Vlad the CEO reads every post.

Game_Ender• 1 year ago

Can you describe the why of the policy and if you are ok sharing the industry?

I am also curious if you have other restrictions on information sharing, API usage, and what reference documentation to use.

CubsFan10602• 1 year ago

I unfortunately don't make the policies, or always agree with them. But, I do have to follow them.

doublerabbit• 1 year ago

Settings > Search > Manage search AI features

Has the option to turn off Auto AI feature.

It might be an good idea to post on their support forum.

freediver5• 1 year ago

Curious is it no AI or no LLMs policy? Search has used some form of AI since inception.

Are you imagining one switch toggle that would disable it at the team account level (or individual account level - in which case it would theoratically still be opt-in and 'available' like it is now).

Genuinly trying to understand the UX of it that would comply with the policy.

ac29• 1 year ago

FastGPT & Kagi Translate have been available for a while, so if you have a Kagi subscription you've already had AI accesss.

casenmgreen• 1 year ago

I subscribed to Kagi a month ago.

It's great.

I'd love for BlueSky takes a subscription model, too, so we don't have to think about advertising or sustainability or all that jazz.

Also means the company's interests much more closely aligned with users interests, rather than advertisers interests.

Night_Thastus• 1 year ago

That's why I moved to a paid mail service myself. I used to have a free one, but it was always lurking in the back of my mind that they'd be selling me to advertisers. (Plus, the service sucked)

scosman2• 1 year ago

Okay - this is amazing. I’m a happy paying Kagi user. Getting to apply almost all of my payment towards for cross-platform tokens as a bonus - wow.

This will replace a chatGPT and Anthropic sub for most everyday users. Their assistant is better than bringing my own keys to a client for most use cases. Just wow.

snackernews• 1 year ago

I agree. I’m on the $10 professional plan and honestly if I’d received an email offering this for an extra $5 per month it would have been a no brainer for me.

Please Kagi, don’t take too much of a haircut or let paying for this eat into the core search budget.

scosman2• 1 year ago

They have usage data and I'm sure they did the math. A few users will max this, but most won't touch it or only do a few requests a month. If it bumps their conversion rate it should be worth it. I hope!

346792• 1 year ago

Kagi search is great, but I'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo for search and 300 searches isn't enough. I have no interest in Kagi AI. Adding more searches would've caused me to sign up again. A rate limit instead of a monthly limit would prevent the "search anxiety" that creeps in as your available searches dwindle. Make it so and you can have my money again.

ndaiger• 1 year ago

I also use the $5/month plan, and the few times I have exceeded the 300-search limit, Kagi simply renews my monthly plan early.

For me it's just happened a few times towards the end of the month and I was happy with how they handled the situation.

ksec• 1 year ago

That is actually a really nice model. Effectively it is 300 Search for $5 valid for one month. And instantly renew if you exceed $5.

May be Kagi could also consider rolling over unused search for one month. So if you only did 200 searches, the remaining 100 will roll over to next month so you have 400 searches.

lurk24• 1 year ago

Do you mean that they charge you an additional $5 (so in a 12 month period, exceeding the 300 search limit would result in 13 payments instead of 12), or does the next month’s subscription payment get moved up to the day that you ran out searches, with the number of payments remaining the same?

lurk24• 1 year ago

I suspect that Kagi’s price point might be a close approximation of what these services actually cost to provide without being subsidized by ad services and data harvesting; free search can only really sustain itself under those conditions. Heavy users who block ads have been getting subsidized by other users for decades now, and this has led these users to expect these services to be provided at an unrealistically low price.

346792• 1 year ago

If they can't scale 300 searches for way less than $5 in costs, they are doing something very wrong. Consider that you can get 1M tokens of inference for less.

atmosx2• 1 year ago

Yes, but don’t twist it: it’s VC money, greedy corporations and personal data exploitation that enabled all that. Not those who came to expect expensive services for free.

fiatjaf2• 1 year ago

$10/mo is very cheap for such a high-quality service.

carlosjobim• 1 year ago

It simply isn't worth servicing people who aren't willing to pay $10 per month. They are problem customers and frequently churn. Much better for your sanity and your wallet to focus on improving your offer for the people who are happy to pay.

packetlost• 1 year ago

I've been paying for the $10/m for quite awhile now and it's one of the better QoL subscriptions I have.

skrtks• 1 year ago

I’m usually cautious with subscriptions and regularly review what I’m paying for. That said, Kagi at $10/month has earned its place — been using it for 20 months now and it’s been worth every cent.

MostlyStable2• 1 year ago

I'm curious about how you think about the "value" for a service like Kagi? What determines how much it is worth to you? I don't think that Kagi is for everyone, but, at least for my own internal model of value, Kagi comes out so far ahead, that I'm curious about alternate ways of thinking about value that don't see it that way (to be extra clear: I do not think that my view is the "correct" view or only view).

dmos62• 1 year ago

How do you think about its value? I too am interested in others' perspectives. I'm not the person you asked, but I rarely do more than "{query} reddit" or "{technology name} {documentation-oriented query}". Google, or any of its free competitors, work fine for that. On top of that I'm subscription averse: the only "digital" subscription I have is additional google drive capacity and a VPS, which together cost less than 10 moneys per month, and I'm fantasizing about canceling those too.

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

I'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo for search and 300 searches isn't enough

Most of the population is well served with search funded with ads and tracking. Kagi is for the minority who don’t want that. I’m not sure there is enough if a market between 300 and some other number that would treat search anxiety just to satisfy those who won’t pay $60 a year more to relieve it.

EasyMark2• 1 year ago

I'm gonna guess you aren't their target audience, so you both win thanks to the filter of capitalism. $10 a month to avoid google and microsoft AND get a decent AI assistant is a bargain to me. Plus it's a small tech company trying to make a good product for a certain audience and I can dig that. I hope they succeed and become wealthy.

fiatjaf2• 1 year ago

For most very simple use cases -- like, I don't know, if you want to know how to sort a list in Kotlin -- just using the Kagi in-search assistant is more than enough, you can search with: "sort list kotlin, code example?" (with the question mark) and you'll get brief explanations with code examples based on search results (or whatever. I don't know, it works).

The model they're using for these must not be a very good one, but for most things it's enough, and very fast.

diggan• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how to access this, both the link in the top right inside Kagi and from "The direct link to the Assistant" (https://kagi.com/assistant) from the docs, just lead me back to the same docs page. Anyone know what's going on and seeing the same issue? I'm on the "Professional" if that matters.

moelf• 1 year ago

they're doing a rolling out, so try again later.

seth_at_kagi2• 1 year ago

Hey - We're doing a phased rollout over the next few days. Currently we've rolled out to all US regions - and we plan to enable more very soon! (as soon as today - if everything seems right!)

We'll also be sending out a toast message to everyone once it's globally rolled out.

lawn• 1 year ago

I love Kagi and it's easily worth the money.

I even use an Ultimate plan to try out the different models but I use it so rarely that it's probably better to downgrade.

I wonder, what's the upside for the Ultimate plan now? Just better models?

g42gregory• 1 year ago

How is the different from 3.7 sonnet connected to the web search? Or Gemini 2.5 with search capabilities? Am I to rely on Kagi being better and capable of continuing to be better than frontier models at search?

hairofadog• 1 year ago

It's a front end for all of those models. I haven't signed up for it but I'm considering it as I pay for both Kagi and Claude for a total of $35/month, whereas this would be $25 if I understand correctly.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...

freediver5• 1 year ago

Difference #1 - Flexibility - in Kagi you choose any model you want to work with, not just models from one company

Difference #2 - Quality - Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search. Ultimately, model quality will converge to the same place, quality of search results will remain a major difference.

Difference #3 - Privacy - Using models through Kagi is more privacy respecting due to non-training for API calls.

rglover• 1 year ago

This is a great deal. Switching to Kagi was like getting OG Google search back. I'm also blown away by how good it is. I used DDG but was never really happy (always had to go back to Google for certain things).

Love that for $25/mo, you can get access to GPT 4o, Sonnet, and other models along with high-quality search.

Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

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