You mean being way too expensive? I appreciate them wanting to stay afloat but they need to bring the cost per search down drastically. They are doing something wrong behind the scenes with regards to spend or optimization.
I disagree. You have to remember how disadvantaged the online ad market actually is. Many of those ad networks also are simply legitimizing fraud on the advertisers, but because the networks aren't big enough at competitors, and all existing implementations suffer the same issues you really don't get what you pay for as Uber found out years ago.
https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/blog/digital-marketing/uber...
Unlike the other comments down-thread, this number feels right. I don't like it, and my gut doesn't want to accept this. If you're not harvesting user data and/or selling ads, and the monthly subscriptions are the only source of revenue then $14.50/month sounds right.
I'm still riding this fun'sies train so lets just kick some numbers around. I suspect their FAQ might be a little out of date, but lets go with it. https://kagi.com/faq says that, "it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches". 1000 searches / 80 = $12.50, so they make $2 per month from me. I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx. If it doesn't, then that $2 per month gets a bit more sad. https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months states that, "Kagi search is currently serving ~2,600 paid customers." from September 1st last year. Let's say they've grown 10x since then and we're at 26,000 paying customers and they're all me. $52,000 in profit on $377,000 per month in revenue. So they're clearing $624,000 a year on this totally hypothetical scenario.
Is https://moneyconnexion.com/per-second-earnings-of-top-compan... accurate? Who knows. If it is accurate, it takes Google just shy of 15 minutes to make that same $624,000.
Mostly this is just me thinking out loud. Like I said, I'm trying to wrap my head around this pricing.
> so they make $2 per month from me
That would be roughly right.
> I hope that 80 searches for $1 covers all of their OpEx
It does cover only the search and infrastructure cost, not salaries and other operations.
According to my calculations, Google is making $5.60 on those same 80 searches from ads (roughly 7 cents per search), so $1 cost from Kagi is a bargain! :)
For what search is worth to me, that seems reasonable. (Or I guess more to the point, how much I value a relationship where I’m the customer, rather than companies expressly interested in using psychological manipulation to influence my behavior…)
That said, I think Kagi should consider rethinking their pricing model, because the perception is what matters if it presents as a roadblock.
I agree, we will get there.
1.5 cents per search doesn't sound expensive, although if you do 100 searches per day that's $45 per month...
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-...
Hopefully they can get volume discounts and reduce the prices.
Kagi will remain at ~$10 (and yes we will be replacing Bing).
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing-update