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Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Not saying you're wrong, but they grandfathered me on the $10/mo plan with the new pricing changes, and that would cover your usage. I think on the new plans 30 searches a day would come out to $13/month.

I know it may sound like a lot (and definitely is a lot for some folks), but when I think about it as literally being the window to a huge amount of knowledge I take in, the fact that it's way less than Adobe products, and similar to things like GitHub, Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc. feels pretty reasonable.

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I've tried Kagi as primary search for a few months and used DDG as primary for a long time before that. Recently I default to using phind.com. Don't think they'll be able to stay free forever, but as it is the mix of free access to GPT-4 and the focus on being developer-friendly makes it feel much better than alternatives (perplexity.ai being the closest competitor, but not feeling quite right for me).

For developers, I should also mention Bing Chat seems to be in the lead for asking questions like, "In this <github repo link>, can you tell me what this function does <function name>?" (or insert your own question you might ask another developer about some repo). I suspect this is because Microsoft has already done the chunking/embedding/vector-storage for all of Github and Bing Chat is querying a vector database for info about the repo, whereas the other GPT-search-chat offerings aren't there yet.

Curious can you 'grep the web' with it and how do you handle shopping, image/videos/news/maps types of searches?

> What AI model are you?

> ANSWER

> I am an AI language model powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo. My primary purpose is to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I can perform various tasks, such as answering questions, providing explanations, and even writing code snippets.

Looks like it's not on v4 yet.

The "Expert" toggle switches it to GPT-4. You can tell by how slow it responds then (note that I've seen it switch over to turbo when you ask followup questions recently).

It's worth pointing out that the "window to a huge amount of knowledge" feature isn't really what you're paying for. The question isn't "is access to a search engine worth $10 a month to me?" (probably yes), it's "Is the delta in functionality with DDG/Google/Bing/Ask Jeeves worth $10 a month to me?" (maybe).

It's a pretty big problem in internet tech, actually. Ad revenue has poisoned the well, creating a situation where it's really, really hard to create a compelling product that isn't based on advertising, because you end up having to compete with "free" alternatives. Thus from a consumer's perspective the cost of the product needs to be in the added functionality over the alternatives, since they see your base functionality's perceived value as $0.

It's gotten to a point where I don't think it's fixable at a grassroots level.

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