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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

I cancelled by Kagi subscription because of this.

I don't want to have to pause before I search and think "do I need to search for this? should I look through my bookmarks, notes, etc? is this worth one of the 7 searches my $5 plan will cover for the day?".

I've been a frequent user of Kagi for the past ~9 months. Last month I made 1600 searches.

I've even 'tipped the difference' (~$70) in the past to support Kagi. It feels gross that they're now upcharging me despite the goodwill I showed them. I know they're a business, but if you're a business, and you're not willing to respect your users, then don't ask for donations.

I hope that something better than Google comes along. It was Kagi, but now it's back to the drawing board for me.

My advice to Kagi: make searches cheaper. This product has no future otherwise.

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I was finding it hard to justify the current price. This new pricing is madness to me.

I think their rationale about the 'average number of searches' is misguided - what about the average number from people who are Kagi users? Those are the ones willing to pay for search, which I'd argue are currently not the 'average internet user'.

In the FAQ they they mention the average Kagi user does 700 searches a month. Perhaps uncoincidentally, the $10/month plan includes exactly that many searches.

I hope it will be possible to transfer unused searches from the current month to the next. If I have 400 in February and 760 in March it would be very annoying to suddenly be forced to pay or need change back to Bing.

It will not be possible.

https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing#faq (Third question.)

The justification they give seems to be nonsense: "While we understand that this may be inconvenient for some users, it’s important to note that providing free trial accounts and supporting our team members’ salaries requires a delicate balance. "

Well that's a waste. I'll see how it goes but if it annoys me I'll cancel the subscription.

It does appear that my current usage (as confirmed on their linked dashboard) will be covered by $10/mo plan I'm already effectively on.

Without even considering the early adopter benefit, this pricing update for me is a nothing-burger.

I am exactly in the same boat. I had raised my concerns regarding pricing twice and both the times they had said that they will introduce new pricing model. I was really hoping that they will reduce my $10/mo subscription pricing.

It’s a classic startup mistake – alienate your current evangelical users so you can appeal to the (uninterested) masses. Paul Graham has a line about how you should aim for a deep but narrow well rather than a wide but shallow one. Sad that Kagi hasn’t realised this and decided to plough ahead with this ridiculous strategy.

I find the pricing more annoying than anything. I'm a paid user and I've never come close to using more searches than their claimed cost (which admittedly I don't understand fully, is it just the marginal cost?) So I could probably pick a lower usage plan, it's just one more thing to think about, like back in the days of having to decide which phone minutes plan is better. It sows confusion and doesn't benefit the customer. Maybe they should add a "my five" top searches that are free.

I know people will say it's not a big deal, but it's more friction.

Also as I've said before, I have no interest in paying for any of the "AI" features. I haven't looked closely enough to understand if these costs are baked into search query costs now, but any suggestion I have to pay to have Eliza read me my search results is a dealbreaker for me.

Replying to myself re the "AI"

The Kagi announcement says this is what it will cost

  Summarize results: 0-1 searches

  Summarize document: 0-20 searches (depending on length of the document, this can process 100 page research papers or even books)

  Ask questions about document: 0-20 searches (depending on the length of the document and the length of interaction)

So it's optional, however they also say this:

  However, incorporating generative AI into search can be expensive, so we had to consider this in our pricing model.

Which implies that it's making everything more expensive.

I was thinking about the decision to add this AI stuff - I guess I see why they did it, they say it's always been part of the vision and pressure (even internal) to add such features and not feel like they're falling behind other offerings must be intense.

Personally I think it's a mistake. "Generative AI" has instantly become dime-a-dozen and everybody and his dog has a startup competing in this space. Another me-too offering doesn't add to this. Good paid search was an almost open playing field, which is what made kagi so special in the first place. I think they could have focused on doing this well (and reducing costs).

Wasting money and time on the AI integration was a huge mistake. If I want ChatGPT to hallucinate a page for me, I can cut-and-paste it myself.

When I saw this my initial reaction was to cancel, then I checked my usage with the early adopter professional plan it seems I'm mostly covered with 1000 searches a month inlcuded in the $10 subscription. Maybe some months I'll incur a small charge but nothing over $14 I don't imagine.

I could also reduce the cost pretty easily if I'm honest. I could stop searching for a site and clicking the result rather than entering the URL or using a bookmark. I could use a sites search function more often too rather than searching kagi for website name + keyword.

Some years ago I moved to a house with a water meter, previously I paid a flat rate and could use as much water as I wanted. I wasn't happy at first, but when I thought about it, being mindful about how much water I'm using is a good thing. Even if I live in a country where it rains constantly.

I'll keep on using and paying for Kagi, I really like what they are doing so far.

Yeah, their product is too good to cancel unfortunately. But the fact that they don't seem to care about search any more, instead focusing on AI and browser stuff, is disappointing.

pathetic

I think what becomes clear from this price increase is how expensive search is.

Google seems to be free, but they are making a profit by gatekeeping the internet. If you offer a product or service, and you want people to find your restaurant, your hotel, your guided tour, your private tutoring lessons, or anything else, you pretty much have to pay Google.

It's kinda like the Yellow Pages, except 100x more expensive.

If you as a user don't want your search results dictated by who pays the most, it's going to be expensive.

I'm paying ~10 bucks for spotify to stream music non stop. I'm also paying netflix some ~16 bucks for 4K movies/series. There's no way a text search is more expensive than a 4k, 5.1 channels movie.

I'm using Kagi since they were in beta, but as soon as my subscription expires, I'm done...

It certainly can be more expensive than streaming. Bandwidth is very cheap. (Cloud provider bandwidth charges are completely artificial and pure profit.) Search requires a lot more compute and fast storage as well as more developers since it’s a much harder problem.

Arbitrary and quite possibly unique searches over substantially all knowledge ever produced by humanity seem a lot harder than sending an unchanging large file over a network.

And since Bing rasing prices affects their price so much, I'd argue that Kagi isn't investing enough into their own crawler/index, so that they can ultimately bring down the price of search.

Instead they're integrating yet another third-party (OpenAI), thereby rasing the price even more and tying their price to third-party API pricing even more.

Same here. I Would have appreciate them to keep price for early adopters. It would have been a smart move towards dedicated users/believers and prevent them from the unavoidable bleeding to come... that will lead to more money issues. Too bad, I absolutely loved it.

It seems to be the case, though: "Every account with an active subscription at the moment of the pricing change on March 15 will get the “Early adopter” status. This will make the special “Early Adopter Professional” plan available to them instead of the regular Professional plan, with the main difference being 1,000 free included searches monthly, instead of 700." Ref. https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing#existing

Back in September they promised this[1]:

> 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.

My guess is that they will focus on the "subscription _price_" wording. Technically the price didn't change, since you can still pay them $10. They "just" changed the terms.

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

It's unfortunate since this is not what I (most people?) think when we hear "grandfathering".

Also, why do we find this out over a blogpost. Where's the email saying "oh by the way the your subscription is changing in a drastic way"?

They sent out an email last night, to me at least

Huh, must be just me. Mine doesn't seem to be anywhere, I have the product email setting turned on, and I get their billing emails. Strange.

Mine was in spam with a pretty high spam score.

Yep. I canceled the two accounts I’m responsible for.

I thought Kagi was going to be search for adults, but they have a serious problem with chasing the latest shiny API.

They keep jacking up their cost per search for features I actively dislike. I hope another paid search engine arises.

I won't be cancelling now as I seem to be averaging a bit more than 1000, meaning pricing will stay about the same since I should get the early adopter subscription.

However, the "average amount of searches" they're stating really can't be accurate for any tech savvy user who is using it professionally and privately. It really has to become cheaper, if it doesn't I sadly don't see myself using it long-term.

Bing increased their search API from 1.25 cents to 2.8 cents. As they are a wrapper around Bing it makes sense they have to increase their prices quite a bit.

LOL they’re just a wrapper around Bing??

No but they do incorporate Google and Bing results in their search. They should probably work towards their own index to lower their costs.

Yeah, ultimately this is what turned me off. Used the beta and loved it for as long as it lasted. When it ended it was hard to migrate elsewhere but I couldn't convince myself it was a good idea to continue investing in a service that was entirely at the mercy of its direct competitors and shows no signs its working to reduce that risk and cost.

Unless they mitigate those risks they will only exist for as long as google or bing wants them to. The only ways they survive are: - Mitigating those risks and costs (e.g., building/using own index, well designed caching could help) - Staying small enough in terms of searches and users to be under the radar for Google and Microsoft - Pray for the mercy of two of the most ruthlessly anticompetitive companies in existence (laughable) - Convincing Google or Microsoft that they are worthwhile to acquire (but this kills the service for me anyways)

Price hiking +150% for the stated reason that my direct competitor increased my costs certainly shows the pressure is on and working as intended. On the off chance that kagi devs or management reads this, PLEASE find a way to isolate yourself from being totally reliant on google,bing,etc. Unless you are going for an acquisition exit from Google or Microsoft, it will kill your company eventually.

They have their own index[1]. It's not easy, when a bunch of sites block anyone who isn't Google or Bing. But this is the same strategy Brave seems to be pursuing, where they try to rely more and more on their own indices.

[1] http://teclis.com

Good to know they are working on this.

Is there a legal issue with spoofing user agent to be the google crawler? Spoofing is certainly enough to get rid of article paywalls for 99% of sites Ive encountered. At least last I heard you can also work around cloudflare captcha by just routing requests through a worker on their service.

> The crawler is hybrid, using async python requests and puppeteer with uBlock Origin. The way detection works is we count the number of uBO blocked requests on the page, and if too many (threshold is set to 5), we kick it out, leaving only "clean" pages in the index.

Fascinating; cnn.com reports 47 on the front page, npr.org is at 16, developer.hashicorp.com is at 9. I don't think that metric is doing what they think it is, or rather maybe they're trying to target only savanna.gnu.org style sites or something

Same sentiment here. The last thing I want to do is adding friction to my research and having to consider whether I should use Google instead for some queries.

So under the new plan, I'd have to base my decision on the ultimate plan, $25. That's quite a steep change from $10...

I'll probably get the annual plan to lock it for a year and evaluate again next year.

The most annoying part is that it seems that the price is increasing partly due to their investment to AI and the browser. They are cool and all but I only agreed to pay for search :/

Same here, I immediately canceled upon reading about the changes.

I'm afraid idea of paying for search engine has no future at all. Connecting my search queries with credit card is no option for anyone who want privacy - no matter what Vlad saying or not.

Without any proof there could be only trust.

Sorry I don’t understand this POV.

We know Kagi is losing money on that pricing. ( They have stated it multiple times ). They offer options to donate for those willing to help and chip in.

They now updated the pricing model. They gave you extra 300 on top of their current pricing. The extra 600 search will only cost you $9 more, slightly more than what you tipped them.

So what is wrong ?

And you are supporting their browser development. I mean I understand people want unlimited, but then you are already tipping them. So something must be missing here I am not getting it.

How do you see they give extra?

With the old pricing, it's unlimited searches for 10$ a month. With the new pricing, you're now limited to 1000 for this price.

They are giving extra when you factor in the donations. The old pricing was losing money.

The top poster doesn't seem to think the price should even cover kagi's costs, which is absurd.

> The top poster doesn't seem to think the price should even cover Kagi's costs, which is absurd.

No, they definitely should cover their costs. They're a business.

But, the cost they're charging is too much. I don't care how much it costs you to perform a search, I care how much it costs me.

They have every right to cover their costs but I don't appreciate the bait and switch. It seems like a desperation move since I don't see how they can sustain and grow their user base at these price points.

You're right that the cost is more or less the same. The problem is that they burned a lot of goodwill.

> The extra 600 search will only cost you $9 more, slightly more than what you tipped them.

I _chose_ to pay more not because I value search at that price, but rather because I liked Kagi and wanted to support them. I'm not going to be forced to pay $20/mo (or whatever it ends up being) for search.

> And you are supporting their browser development.

I tried their browser. I didn't like it.

It's a 150% price increase if you don't want metered search. I probably would have been ok with a reasonable price increase, maybe 25% to 50%. But it's a lot to ask of your users when most of us have to manage a number of subscriptions and almost all of them have had price increases over the past year.

Just speaking for myself, I don't care about their browser or "AI" features. Paying more for search to subsidize those projects is a turn off for me.

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