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
