Comment by S6eUL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by S6eUL | Hacker News Reader

I joined the Kagi beta two weeks before it ended and have been a paying user ever since. I find the price to be quite steep but so far it have no regrets and will most likely continue my subscription. I average over 2000 queries per month.

- Search result quality is at least equal to Google for most queries and far superior for queries involving discussions or technical topics. Sadly, it is inferior for queries in my area of expertise (Swiss law).

- Kagi is the only alternative to Google that I know of (and I have tried many) which is able to produce good regional results and mix them - when appropriate - with international results. Most privacy focused search engines are very US centric.

- Blog spam and copy cats are not completely gone but the situation is at least bearable, especially after continuosly filtering them and boosting credible sites instead.

- Customization options, filtering options, speed and site layout are also far superior when compared to Google.

Apart from the lower quality results from queries involving my area of expertise, the only thing that still keeps me using Google Search are the reviews from Google Maps.

All in all, I recommend supporting this product.

I also have been using since beta, and agree with you. For me, the ability to boost and block certain domains is a killer feature. (There are probably solutions for other services, but to have it built-in is great.)

For developer-related queries I`m pleased with the results!

Odd you say the price is steep - I have been using it mostly exclusively for a few months now and I haven't even thought about it cost. It must come out to under 0.1¢ per search.

> It must come out to under 0.1¢ per search.

I was struck by their pricing page [0] which says that "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches" and that "at USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use". I don't think they're going to be right that beta testers will do more searches than average users, and I think that they'll attract heavy searchers (the ones most noticing and disliking Google's quality). I would be surprised if I search less than 50 times a day, and that's probably just during work. If I was a paid Kagi user they'd be losing money on me. They say their price might have to go up, I don't see how they're going to avoid that.

[0] https://kagi.com/pricing

I agree that it was an impressive product but couldn’t justify it based on the cost of living where I live and relative to other things I subscribe to (including my Fiber connection). I do hope things like this succeed.

That sounds unsettling, given the normal trajectory for software companies running at a loss (get VC, adjust goals to match VC desire, etc). For a privacy focused company it feels like they already lost the normal leverage line item of doing "something" with user data.

I dunno, "if you're not paying, you're the product", but how does that fit if you are paying, but what your paying isn't actually enough? Whats the other product?

Hope they do well.

I can afford it but when compared to other stuff it just seems steep:

- Half the price of my fiber subscription

- Double the price of my VPS subscription

- Same price as my mobile subscription

I’m jealous of your other subscription costs…

Honestly there has to be something wrong with software pricing. Slack cost per user is similar to giving everyone in company sim card, while cell operators have to maintain both, massive physical infrastructure AND software infrastructure. Seems like most of SaaS environment is horribly inefficient.

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