Hacker News Reader

Comment by AOsborn | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel that the pricing is backwards.

I understand funding the growth of the business but $120/year per-person isn't going to fly.

Imagine trying to explain to your family why they should switch - oh, that is four accounts - nearly $500/year.

Instead I think the pricing should be something that is 'set and forget'. $10/year with an annual payment would probably be enough to get me to sign up.

Then the issue is scale. I remember old Twitter revenue models being discussed - $1/user/year - once you have 10m, 100m users etc the business will be well funded.

View on HN

This is absolutely worth $10 a month.

For a family of 4, maybe, maybe not. I'd argue still yes, though. It needs to get bought by Apple or at least white labeled by Apple to make free as part of Apple One for families.

Agreed. It seems most comments in here find the quality noticeably better than G or DDG (I know I do.)

Given that, I suppose I could empathize with a hypothetical user who cares about search quality but finds $7 lattes prohibitively expensive. For the rest of us price as a counter argument just seems silly.

If it did indeed get bought by Apple, I'd go back to DDG.

Apple doesn't need to buy everything and in my opinion they're not the saviour.

If they can white label CloudFlare as part of their iPrivacy for everyone with iCloud+, they could white label kagi as well.

The catch, of course, is the $15B (billion with a B) annual payment from Google to stay the default.

That's (a) not insignificant even to Apple bottom line, (b) tells you a little something about the value to Google of even the nearly last place marketshare of searches using Safari.

Could you tell me is Kagi allow you to search pirated or adult content?

You may be interested in the (slightly dated) information about how much it costs for them to run the search engine. What you're proposing wouldn't be viable: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#finan...

It seems incredibly inefficient if each search actually costs them 1.25 cents. Obviously, I have no real idea, but I just can't imagine that Google earns even a penny per search from ads.

First search result (not a credible one but I can't find a better number) says google does 2 trillion searches per year [0], or at least on that scale. Two trillion at a penny each would be $20 Billion. And you'd expect some economies of scale, though maybe some inefficient in running their ad and tracking apparatus. No idea what google actually spends but their revenue is something like 250 Billion so $20 billion is an underestimate. Anyway, in that context, Kagi's numbers don't sound to weird.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trilli...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com