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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

If Kagi keeps charging, it will never be popular. They could lower their price to $0.99 a year with the same result. And that's a good thing.

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It's unlikely they can make a profit doing that. Servers, devs, etc cost money. This way they keep the audience smaller and can make money as well. It's a business, so you do what you gotta do.

I think you're missing the point: a price barrier regardless how big is good.

I think the main point was that any price barrier over 0 dollars limits your audience, regardless of profitability. That literal pay wall simply makes people start to question. Especially if a "free" alternative exists and they don't care about the pitch (in this case, privacy or less low quality results in search).

That's arguably a good thing since a premium model mitigates the temptation of ad or data selling based approaches. But the fact is many don't care nor mind those as long as they aren't extremely intrusive. Even if they are (full page banner ad with small x), they may tolerate it anyway.

By that logic, life itself can never be popular. Everyone in the world makes/has access to a non-zero amount of money, and where it goes is our collective human decision for how the world should operate. You're spending money right now, because of your opportunity cost!

Kagi v Google, in terms of "How do you operate as an organization wrt the world?"?

Kagi wins hands-down. I couldn't care less about the privacy angle, the QUALITY is amazing. It's like traveling back to 2008, and for $10/mo that's a sweet deal.

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