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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

Founder here, it was quite a journey very excited to be launching beta today with payments. The idea of paying for web search was unimaginable three years ago when we started this.

AMA!

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Point of feedback for your consideration, I was surprised that Orion+ did not include source code. Binary-only releases seem to me an enemy of both privacy and tinkering, and represent a showstopper for the (admittedly likely quite narrow) segment of possible customers I personify. Open source is mentioned aspirationally in the FAQ; however, I don't personally need a FOSS license, just an individual right to read, modify, and rebuild for personal use, and that's something I value - as in, willing to pay for.

Kagi is still a tiny company (<15 people total).

We are not ready (in terms of not having enough resources) to maintain an open source project, of a size of a web browser. Much bigger companies fail at running open source projects and properly engaging community, and we'd rather not try at all, than do it in a bad way. I hope this changes in the future.

Okay - but just to be clear, I'm not suggesting Orion become an open source project; I am suggesting non-free access to source code as an Orion+ subscription inclusion.

I just want to say thank you, I think I’ve only opted to use Google a handful of times since I started using Kagi for work (software eng).

I always thought that JetBrains IDEs were the only products that raised my professional productivity so much that they were worth paying for, but now Kagi will join that club.

What makes processing searches so expensive? I see elsewhere in this forum that it’s $1/80 searches. I’m just curious what part of your infra is costing you so much.

Great question! Mostly paid APIs we use (probably 80%), rest is infrastructure.

But I will counter with this. It costs $0.0125 to run a web search over the entire web, producing meaningful, relevant and rich results, and all that in less than 500ms, any time of day, from anywhere. That is 1.25 cents to do all of the above. And the value you can get from that one search can often be 1,000,000x more.

That has to be one of the best deals in the universe.

(and mind you, with other search engines that cost is still there, it is only paid by their customers - the advertisers)

I suspect that your estimate of google search infrastructure costs may be high by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Have you considered what the cost would be if the external APIs were in-housed? As an early-stage startup, you likewise are paying extra for compute, and expedient but often inefficient systems.

Is there a path to a <$5/mo unlimited plan? IIRC Google made less than $10 per year per user up until the mid 2010s.

You are probably right if we disregard the 20 years of cap-ex investments Google made into having that infrastructure. In order to in-house this we would probably need to own $500M-$1B worth of infrastructure at the very least (web is vast). Yes then the cost per search would be lower.

Maybe it will sound strange, but I do not think of our goal as optimizing for growth and number of users. It is to optimize for sustainability and quality of product. Often these two incentives are opposite of one another. I see us as a small, boutique, premium search brand. I'd rather have us gain more users by improving the quality than by lowering the price.

This strategy of not focusing on growth is key to my interests. For example, I’ve been a customer of Fastmail since they launched maybe 20 years ago. And I’ve got my family and many colleagues using Fastmail. It is a paid email service.

Could I use any of the “free” email services like GMail (or back in the day, Yahoo)? Of course. But Fastmail does one thing and they do it well, and I don’t have to worry about them analyzing my emails and selling ads to me. I am willing to pay for that.

Please stay focused. I just tried Kagi today and I’m incredibly surprised at how fantastic the search results are. I never thought I would pay for a search engine but here I am.

Assuming you experience good growth in your business, is there room for you to reduce your dependency on external API's, while maintaining the good quality search results you seem to be generating?

And to add to what others have been saying, I've been finding your results to be quite high quality, absolutely better than DDG and probably better than Google for me too. I subscribed immediately. The only thing I'm missing is I'm still getting slow result times from Australia. Just now, for a test search:

Connected to: ASIA-SOUTHEAST Network latency: 501ms

We'd like to better understand what is going on. Would you be able to post here ? https://kagifeedback.org/d/183-kagi-slow-post-here

Recording a side by side video of DuckDuckGo results and Kagi results with network tab in browser open would be great, if you can.

Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.

For certain definitions of “free”

spending time scrolling to try and find where the ad results end and my organic results begin is one thing that feels very un-free

yup! If I do a very conservative 40 searches a day, and save 1 second on every search, that will be 20 minutes of time searching saved over a month!. I think that alone might justify the cost for some people.

They've already brought it down a lot, the original plan was to charge $30/mo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30213110

If it really costs them $1 for 80 searches, I don't see how they can bring it much lower. $10 feels like the sweet spot for me.

Is it really hard to justify? Search is one of the things that I do most on the internet. I use it daily. Google search results are really bad for me: full of SEO spam and github/stackoverflow repeaters, or pinterest crap.

I feel it's like paying for a mattress or an office chair: the time I spend there adds up quickly. $120 a year is a freaking good deal for me.

I don't have a sense that Google is free, because I feel mugged by special interests every time I use it.

My marginal resources aren't dollars, they are time & energy.

Unfortunately the price is a function of the search cost, not our wishes. Even at $10/mo it is still unclear whether we can make it to sustainability (this is why we launched payments while still in beta, to find out).

Search cost is non-zero. It was hidden from users for 20 years, and it may come as shock, but it is real.

> Any plans to revisit the pricing? I've in the Kagi beta for months and it's way better than DDG, but it's hard to justify US$120/year when Google is free.

Everyone has different needs, but I've seen this "I hate google but not enough to spare $10 a month out of my budget" sentiment quite a lot in these comments and it really surprises me.

Folks, there are almost non-stop complaints on HN about "big tech is evil" this and "Mozilla is mismanaged" that. There are endless tirades about "big tech monopolies" and how there is an insurmountable dearth of competition in the browser space. The sheer number of comments I've read where people attack Apple because anything that isn't Safari is more or less a second class citizen on their platforms, where people cry out for more options, for even a single ever-loving service that isn't driven by ad revenue, and about how freeloaders who expect unlimited free tiers are the bane of humanity is bonkers.

I mean, HN has tens of thousands of comments bemoaning these things.

Any of you who're reading this and haven't tried it out yet, give the beta a shot and then ask yourselves: is watching and experiencing the continual decline of free services from huge companies (companies that may as well be monopolies and duopolies) worth saving $170 a year (kagi and Orion+)? Or would you rather support a worthy cause with some real potential?

One of the most oft-repeated sayings I see here is "vote with your wallet" and now's the time to do it.

I'm happy to pay for my (private) searches, but $10 for my kind of consumption/volume is simply too expensive;

So, i'm hoping for an alternative/smaller payment option where i can pay based on actual consumption as shown on https://kagi.com/pricing

I have been using Kagi for a few months, and i would definitely recommend it, it has great potential!

Thanks for making this Vlad! I’ve been testing it out for the last few months and it’s really coming along. As a developer who used the old Kagi.com before you bought it, I’m curious about what inspired you to pick that particular domain? Did you know Kee?

You are welcome and glad you like it!

No, I did not know Kee or anyone from old Kagi.com team. They went bankrupt in unfortunate turn of events. The opportunity presented itself and I acquired the domain. I liked it because Kagi means 'key' in Japanese and at the time this idea of a 'key to the web', and replacing big-tech infrastructure for consuming the web with something "decent" was forming in my head.

I didn't see it in the FAQ - will Orion be available for other platforms besides Mac, or why only Mac?

There is already an iOS/iPadOS version. Elsewhere, I have read that the developers would like to make a Linux version, but that they currently don’t have the manpower to do so.

I envision Linux next. Windows would be tricky as WebKit is not really up to date on Windows. So we would probably have to resort to a differnt rendering engine. We are long way from this though, that kind of project would probably take 20 people extra.

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