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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

> But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.

> At $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that average use will go down a bit with time because during beta people may be searching more than normal

Oh. I'd say that if I switched to Kagi as to the main search engine, I would increase the number of searches I make. And I definitely do many dozens a day. Their reported beta-testers usage is 30 / day. At their current expense level, that would be $116.25 / mo.

I wonder how can this be sustainable. Maybe they expect a large number of paying users who do 2-3 searches a day.

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> Their reported beta-testers usage is 30 / day. At their current expense level, that would be $116.25 / mo.

30 searches/day comes to around $11/mo. We expect the quantity of usage will drop with time because

a) we make a better product that helps you find stuff more quickly (so quality of usage goes up)

b) lot of users are still searching more then normal because of novelty of product, testing etc.

Of course we could be wrong :)

Oh. Thank you for correcting me; I made an order of magnitude error!

Under this angle, the operation looks rather promising, because with scale and operation experience the per-search cost is likely to go down.

Good search, OTOH, may make you search more, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I am one of the "more than 30 searches per day" beta users.

I just saw this looked at the 10$/mo price tag, gulped, then considered just how much better it makes my life compared to the google results, and paid up.

I wish the team best of luck and want to thank you for already having saved me tons of time and nerves!

I would think that as you grow, economies of scale will kick in and the cost per search should go way, way down.

The index cost is flat per search so with higher adoption it should come down (right?).

They can change the model later, add caching, improve performance, and use better hardware. Just getting a native search engine off the ground is impressive.

They may be running a flask app reading data direct from s3 feeding through a giant ML model right now - which wouldn't be the application architecture they'd use if they served 100x the traffic.

They can but a paid search engine is doomed to fail.

5 years ago I would agree, however we now have.

- Technology which can extract frightening amounts of information from search history, location data, and other data sources. It's not 2012 anymore when a google or FB ui just showing the places you had been was enough to get me to give over that kind of data.

- Ad based search engines literally filling the search page with ads.

- SEO spam so severe that the non-ads are generally terrible pages anyway.

Given all of this, and a young daughter who will be browsing the internet in another year or two - I'd be willing to pay for a search engine.

> Given all of this, and a young daughter who will be browsing the internet in another year or two - I'd be willing to pay for a search engine.

Thanks for saying this, it is not been discussed enough. The main reason I started Kagi was exactly to protect my own kids from being exposed to ads and tracking from the very young age.

This is a random place to throw this at you, but you seem like you have a) the skills and b) and the motivation.

The internet needs an “allowlist” front end for kids, especially for video platforms.

I would pay $20/month for a family subscription to a front end app for Netflix and YouTube that lets me allowlist shows and channels, and never lets Netflix or Youtube AI choose what to show my kids next.

Netflix in particular is extremely subversive. I have seen it stop a show mid-episode to suggest a new show to my 6yo - which is clearly aimed at slightly more mature audiences, and is therefore more exciting/scary for my daughter.

The AI is constantly pushing her toward more mature content even if she doesn’t choose it. And there is NO WAY to stop it other than just get rid of Netflix entirely, but they also have by far the best content for kids.

Anyway, a browser with proper kids controls, good UX for the parents, and especially the ability to filter/block the closed video platforms, would be huge.

This is borderline paranoia.

If you want a more "private" experience, just use an Apple device and search through safari and enable parental controls. Or if you're an Android user, just don't create a google account.

I would think that this cost metric will change to their benefit with scale. Lots of constant factors go into these calculations that are significant when you are small-ish but become insignificant when you scale enough

I do not understand why anyone who only does 2-3 searches a day would pay 10$ a month for a search engine though?

I do not understand how people get through their day without doing at least 2-3 searches an hour. If you're online, working or pretending to work, consuming all that "internetz info", how can you do that without also bombarding Google with Q's about translations between languages, conversion between metric/imperial, basic fact-checking, wikipedia-ing, looking up definitions of words, and such? Even while listening to music, I Google either a phrase from the song or, if I know it, the title plus "lyrics" to immerse myself further into it.

I truly appreciate Kagi's effort and their transparency when it comes to cost.

I will definitely pay money to become "not the product". Is search as important as Netflix? To me, the answer is hell yes. I just need my next search engine to be at least as good as Google. That bar is pretty high, regardless of what we say here on HN.

I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:

Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)

Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/

Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)

Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)

Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)

Another good one for unit conversion:

https://www.gnu.org/software/units/units.html

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