Hacker News Reader

Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I visited a small country in my last vacation. I ended up bringing a bit of money back because I was in a hurry I thought it would be easy to exchange back at home, even at worse rates. I live in a big city after all. Of course, I was very wrong.

I spent an afternoon Googling every possible incantation only to get useless AI generated text, travel agency sites or simply unrelated content.

I was about to accept my loss when I tried Kagi. The first page showed an exchange that accepted the currency. Very far from me and with terrible rates, but still.

Anecdata and all, but the fact is that I'm using Kagi more and more and it's winning my trust and good will fast.

View on HN

As an aside, many full service banks can exchange foreign currency for you. For example, Bank of America does (https://www.bankofamerica.com/foreign-exchange/exchange-rate...). You can also order foreign currency prior to your trip and they'll mail it to you.

Interestingly in my country many full service banks have dropped foriegn currency services. They did that during the panademic but never returned back to offering that again. I suspect they make so much money from Visa/Mastercard commissions that they'd prefer people paid with card rather than cash.

Yeah, a decade or so ago I’m sure I could have found one much easier. The only thing widely accepted is dollars and euros, now.

Right, it’s the same here. I learned that the hard way. If I ever need cash for traveling again, this is the way. I much rather use credit card if I can, however. But this place didn’t even had cell phone signal, so accepting anything other than cash was impossible.

What many people do in this case is to keep the money for the next time you visit the country. (or as souvenirs)

It would have been an expensive souvenir. And I don’t travel all that much. Also, inflation and even outright currency replacements are somewhat common in smaller economies.

This sounds like an ad for Kagi, though.

You mean my comment? It’s not. I have no relation with them other than a free account.

I think 2005-2010 Google was peak web search. It would have given me an obscure blog with the top 5 currency exchange offices. Kagi gave me one single crappy result, but it was still, sadly, better than what 2024 Google can do.

Why would Kagi pay someone to promote them on HN when there's already dozens of praise everyday here?

Even as a happy customer, I can see how suspect this praise can be, but remember that HN is exactly who Kagi was created for. And I don't remember having spend $10 a month on something that had that much impact on my daily life. It's _just_ a search engine, but I do about 50 search a day, and having great results each time while the other one is giving me more and more garbage results is huge. So I completely understand why people satisfied with Kagi can be noisy about how great they think it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com