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Comment by justusthane | Hacker News Reader

I would really love to use Kagi full-time. I'm currently on DDG, but something about them that I can't quite put my finger on rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's the amount they apparently spend on advertising, or maybe it's that they're just sourcing their results from Bing.

Anyway, at $10/mo I’m not quite prepared to put my money where my mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?

Edit: Thanks everyone for the pricing info! I guess in a world where we expect search engines to be free, we don't realize how expensive they actually are to run (at least at smaller scales like Kagi).

Intuitively I would have expected the expensive part to be building the index and for each query to cost fractions of a cent. I am extremely surprised to learn that each query apparently costs them $0.125.

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I feel the same about pricing; $5/mo is about what I’d expect to pay. I’ve been trying it at the current rate though to see how it goes. A fantastic thing they do is tell you how much you’re actually costing them. My billing page says:

     Month  Searches    Cost
  Jun 2022       875  $10.94
  Jul 2022       773   $9.66
  Aug 2022       842  $10.52
  Sep 2022        10   $0.12

  Your total payments: $30.00
  Your total usage: $31.25
  Your payments to usage balance: -$1.25 [Tip the difference]

This is fantastic, and I hope it can be a sustainable practice whether it's them or other larger companies. Transparency is positive when they're the little guy with a nerd audience, but most companies depend on information asymmetry to mess with our sense of value.

made me curious how many search queries I'm doing: averaging 2000/month:

    sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*/places.sqlite "select strftime('%Y/%m', last_visit_date/1000000, 'unixepoch') as yearmonth, substr(p.url,9,14) as search_backend,count(1) as hits from moz_places p where (p.url like 'https://duckduckgo%' or p.url like 'https://www.google.%/search%' or p.url like 'https://www.qwant%') group by search_backend,yearmonth order by yearmonth asc,hits desc;"

add any search engine you use with another 'p.url like'

One thing that I actually love about Kagi, is that they tell you how much you cost them. In the settings, under billing, there is a usage tab where it says how much your queries cost. Apparently last month I "used" $2 more than I paid, hopefully I am making it up with the word of mouth I spread.

There's more info in their FAQ https://kagi.com/faq#cost

Wow I'm more than $10 in the red so far after being subbed for 3 months, with an average of around 1200 search per month!

I really hope that their high costs are due to some inefficiencies (e.g. with their current scale) they haven't been able to work out yet, otherwise that does not bode well for the concept of a paid search engine... or maybe I'm just an extreme outlier? I pretty much only ever search for documentation and things like that while I'm working, but I apparently do that a lot lol.

The price they're using seems to be $0.0125/query. I'm assuming that includes business expenses, like dev/admin/salary costs, and not just the raw costs of executing a query.

I guess a price hike to ~$15/mo would cover my particular usage, and I might be willing to pay that much, although I don't think many others would. $10 is already more than a lot of people are willing to pay just for search. Maybe if they bundled some other services into the subscription it would be more appealing? People expect search to be free, but are willing to pay for other services that are probably much cheaper to operate (VPN, password manager, cloud storage, etc)

> I'm assuming that includes business expenses, like dev/admin/salary costs

It actually does not, it covers infrastructure, but not salaries. Salaries for Orion/Kagi devs are currently paid by Vlad out of pocket, he mentioned that on Discord.

I’d say with 1200 you are slightly above average from what people shared on discord (I only hit $10 in costs in August for the first time).

When the post was discussed on discord, I mentioned that $19/mo would be too much for me, on the other hand I could do $12/mo with a 2-year pre-pay (not that I have to, thanks to the grandfathering)

You are, that is a fantastic way to look at it!

> Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth is. $5/mo would be much more attractive, and I would guess they'd have better profit at that price. How much does each user cost them?

Not really. Between free and paid users, TFA says they average roughly 27 searches per user per day; 1000 searches costs them $12.50. If each user (TFA says roughly 10% of searches come from the free tier) is averaging 810 searches in a month, that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.

I'm one of roughly 2.6k paid users at the moment; they estimate the need for 25k users to be sustainable. There's so much about google and most of its current alternatives that legitimately disgusts me- voting with my wallet is the only option I really have.

>that puts their bare cost at close to $10.13 per user per month, not including salaries and other operating costs.//

You're saying it costs then 1⅛ cents per search excluding wages and other operating costs.

That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?

Edit: this comment [0] indicates every search is actually 3 searches, two at commercial resale rates (Google, Bing) and one against their own index; that probably explains it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678059

> You're saying it costs then 1⅛ cents per search excluding wages and other operating costs.

All I can do is relate what the article says :).

> That seems like they must be vastly over-paying for something? What does that money pay for and who is paying the wages+operational costs?

Well, they use a couple of paid APIs for their queries (as you noted in the edit of your comment). They say in TFA that they're currently breaking even on bare search costs and that the founders are picking up the tab for most of the rest of the expenses.

It says it costs them $12.50 in computing costs per 1,000 queries. It says the average user makes 27 searches per day, including the 10% of free users limited to 50/month, so probably about 30 searches/day for paid users.

$12.50 × (900 ÷ 1000) = $11.25/month/user

> I'm currently on DDG, but something about them that I can't quite put my finger on rubs me the wrong way.

Have you given Brave Search a try? I honestly didn't expect to switch, but after trying it out for a while I ended up making it my default and haven't looked back. Brave is mostly using its own index (in my case, for 87% of my search results).

> Maybe it's the amount they apparently spend on advertising

Hm not sure what you mean, because that amount is currently zero [1]? Kagi is kind of anti-thesis to digital advertising.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#marke...

I think they were talking about DDG with that part.

Oops, thanks I got it wrong!

> Anyway, at $10/mo I can't quite put my money where my mouth is.

Starbucks coffee fallacy :) I.e. it's cheaper than a Starbucks coffe so it must be cheap enough.

The $0.125 is fascinating. According to my stats I query Google between 2500 and 3500 times a month. That would be a $300/mo. bill for Kagi?

I guess most people don't query as much as I do, but seems like it would need quite a number of people underquerying to make up for users who would be similar to me?

It is $0.0125. So more like $30/mo

Based on other data here, it seems like it's $0.0125 / query

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