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Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

>We are also considering a pricing change for our individual plan which is currently $10/month ($120/year). It is clear to us now that providing superior search quality at the current price will not lead to sustainability and that we will need to increase it.

I guess I will be part of the 70% that will drop. Back to DuckDuckGo it is. Great product, enjoyed using it, but $10/mo for searches was tough to swallow, there's no way I can double that. I was really enjoying it but their cost per search is waaaaaaaaay to high and they need to seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and just drop those. I don't necessarily need infoboxes with my search. I'd be happy with just the indexing.

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You may have missed this in the same section:

> If such change to Individual plans is to occur, we plan to grandfather-in all early adopters (meaning all current and future paid customers, up until this change) allowing them to keep their existing subscription price as long as they don’t cancel it.

I appreciate that but I don't want to be sucking money out of an enterprise I'd prefer to see succeed. I search a lot, it's just not viable unfortunately.

> seriously look at which APIs are costing them so much, and just drop those

Well, that would be bing and google. And combining those results is a good part of the magic. Currently, the searches are actually paid for by subscribers, but the founder is paying everyone’s salary out of his own money, so that’s a bit of an issue ;)

I wonder if Kagi could be a 501c and and there might be a way to get funding from other large providers?

Google finances a lot of Firefox, for example, so there is not a monopoly in browsers. One could argue that means Firefox is beholden to Google but in an ideal world it would not be. Mozilla probably gets lots of other donors too. Kagi may be able to do something similar or at minimum get some big donations / endowments from wealthy people who support the cause.

No no I totally get that. It's just....so expensive it seems unrealistic. I pay for /e/OS and /e/Cloud...I pay for a Hetzner box and give money to a number of open source projects. If I'm not their target audience, I'm seriously wondering who is. Maybe I just don't make enough.

Anyways, great service, I hope they figure it out, but I really think they need to get the cost per search down.

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