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.
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.
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.
People like free and the “greedy corporations” found a way to give them what they want.
Google search is trash now (for reasons that aren’t entirely in Google’s control), but for the first decade it was magical how well it could one shot finding relevant data on the web.
> People like free and the “greedy corporations” found a way to give them what they want.
It’s like saying, “People want Fentanyl, so drug dealers just give them what they want.”
Social media causes addiction and depression.
Have you ever tried browsing the web for a couple of months without a Gmail, Facebook, or similar account — and without JavaScript enabled or using only non-standard browsers? The experience is terrible.
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.
You can get 1M tokens of inference because it's subsidized by VC money. The whole point of the parent comment is that this is closer to the actual cost to provide a service.
That $5 has to cover organizational costs, not just compute. There's 40+ employees, so salaries alone would be a significant chunk of their entire income if all of the 45k members were on the $5/mo plan.
the $5 is the cheap drugs that your dealer is offering. They hope you'll start popping for the good stuff for $10, which is often less than I pay for a single lunch, and I use it constantly
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
For me, it is how much faster I find the results I want than I was with Google. The results are enough better that, at the rate I value my time, I'm more than making up the subscription cost every month.
And then the gravy on top is that I fundamentally think that direct payment is a "better" (both from a consumer perspective and from a societal perspective) model than an ad-supported model, so I'm also supporting a company that aligns with that larger philosophical viewpoint.
> 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.
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.
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.
