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Comment by jemmyw | Hacker News Reader

When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything.

I also pay for Kagi. I'm not sure it is justified - it's not that cheap. They're pretty open about their costs though, and I think that demonstrates how much advertising is paying for other services. So I'm happy to pay for now just because I really dislike adverts.

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> luxury item/service

The price for Kagi is not really in the class of "luxury" at $10 per month. It's peanuts really. In exchange you have the best search engine in the world.

If you could upgrade an economy flight ticket to first class for $10, that would be a bargain. If you could buy the best bottle of wine in the world for just $10 more than your average bottle of wine, that would be a bargain. Kagi is the best search engine in the world, that's why I pay for it.

Luxury is a loaded term, I probably should have used something less vague. The examples you gave are still luxuries even if they're only $10 more than the basic version - the cheaper plane ticket still gets you there, the cheaper wine... I'm not really into wine, expensive wine doesn't taste especially different to me... still gets you drunk?

Google still returns search results. You have to crawl through ads or search in different ways, but your result is still going to be in there. So if Kagi is a price and has extra comfort, it's a luxury.

It's a luxury for knowledge workers, like having a chair to sit on is a luxury.

These are not in the same realm. An extra $10 on a $500 or $1500 ticket that you ride maybe once a year is not the same as going from $0 to $10 every single month.

It's $10 more per month for the best service of its kind in the world. On top of that a useful service that can save you time. What other services that are the best in the world can you get for $10 per month?

If two restaurants were side by side, one handing out average meals for free and the other selling the best food in the world for $10, which one would you go to?

Best food in the world? 3 star Michelin? Ok, I'll pay the $10. But if it's only a little better, probably the free one. And if I'm going to be doing this every day.. I'd probably still do the free one most of the time.

I'll argue that Kagi is the best search engine in the world. If there's any better out there, I'll switch to that. For $10 per month it's a bargain. But "free" does things with people's reasoning. As you admit, you'd choose free over the best food in the world most of the time, even if the best food was dirt cheap. I'd choose the best food in the world over free every time, if it was that cheap.

Yes, free messes everything up. If Google was $1 or $2/mo and Kagi was/is significantly better, that drastically changes the equation.

> When you're spending money on a luxury item/service and there's a cheaper (in this case free) alternative, the it's hard to not write in this way. You are justifying it to yourself as much as anything.

That is a gross assumption about the GPs personality. I've bought luxury items before I'd happily publicly badmouth, and others that I'd happily publicly sing the praises of.

I agree with this. The only real advantage to Kagi over just using Google + Adblock for me is an easy way to just completely block certain sites from ever appearing in searches. It's probably not worth $10 a month but I pay for it because SEO spam sites bother me on a personal level.

I don't know how true this is, but I really like the concept of a customer-driven search engine versus an ad-driven one. The incentives are better aligned, and it frees Kagi up to really try to kick ass at search instead of kicking ass at ad revenue. I'm enjoying the features they've been adding, and an looking forward to more.

Besides, what else was I going to do with that YouTube Premium money? ;)

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