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Comment by Vegenoid | Hacker News Reader

Especially ones that do not have their name. As someone who has heard about Kagi, but not actually visited their site or used it, I had no idea they had a dog mascot.

If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.

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Having received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear

But would that make it effective advertising?

But isn't the goal of the t-shirt a gift for the first 20k paying users? The goal for them doesn't seem to be about what they get back from giving away the t-shirt.

That sounds pretty silly.

Shouldn't gifts and similar things come after the business is properly sustainable?

Based on their public data, they have 20,000+ paying users, and 1500 users paying for the family plan, which if all of the users are on the cheapest $5/month plan (which, many probably are on the $10/month plan like myself, as that gives you unlimited searches) would give them $100K+ each month.

Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.

The expensive parts of the infrastructure are not their own, and the expense will scale by number of requests.

Back of the envelope:

The Bing API costs about $0.015 per query at the most cost effective tier. Kagi's highest revenue per query pricing is $5/300 queries = $0.166 / query. That's pretty slim margins, and only made worse by the $10 tier.

Now, they can of course start doing exclusively their own crawling, indexing and ranking and avoid paying some larger search engine for API access. But for that to be cheaper, they need orders of magnitude more scale

Kagi has a bunch of different sources, it doesn't seem like all results come from the same source, so without any particular insight into how each query works behind the scenes, I'd gather it be very hard for any of us to come up with an average cost per query like you tried to do.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Sure, that's why I explicitly stated it was a back of the envelope calculation. It wont be right to the penny, but it will certainly have the right order of magnitude.

I'll assert that even a back of the envelope calculation is more useful than your initial "they must be sustainable unless the infra is inefficient, and it feels like it isn't" statement. Do you have an actual number rather than feelings? Is that number significantly lower than this estimate?

Vlad from Kagi here. We are very close to breakeven currently, with 4+ years runway with current spend and it gets better every day. Budget for shirts was allocated months ago.

Kagi is slightly different than other SV startups in how we approach things because of the freedom given by being (nearly) completely bootstrapped and built with sustainability in mind since day one. Some companies buy ads to attract new customers, we buy tshirts to show gratitude to existing. We also reinvest any savings we make into lowering the price and increasing the value of the product (check our product velocity in release notes [1]). Our customers propelled us to where we are through word of mouth, it makes sense to keep investing in nurturing that relationship. And having 20,000 doggos walk around the earth soon is fun.

Winning in search is a marathon, not a sprint. We might as well enjoy the run.

[1] https://kagi.com/changelog

> We are very close to breakeven currently ...

Cool. Didn't realise that.

That's really good news as it proves the "search engine people pay for" concept is workable, unlike what many people seemed to think. :)

I suppose it wouldn't! Perhaps it might develop brand awareness. (I am thinking about Nike's swoosh or Vercel's triangle)

There was a hilarious blog post on here a few months ago from some guy who collects database company T shirts. A lot of them are quite bad but a few are really good. IIRC his favorite was from Snowflake.

Edit: apparently his favorite was from mongo: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2016/07/my-favorite-datab... which I have to agree with, that is a good shirt.

I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.

For reference, that "some guy" is Andy Pavlo, a professor of databases at Carnegie Mellon. He has a lot of neat writeups online, like this annual review of new database systems [0]. He puts up lectures on the internet for free too.

Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D

[0]: https://ottertune.com/blog/2022-databases-retrospective

I’ve used Kagi as my default search engine for months and wasn’t aware it had a dog mascot either! I’ll probably turn the shirt into some word-of-mouth marketing at my gym, so I wouldn’t say my free shirt is a terrible investment.

Looked at the shirt, it looks pretty nice. Definitely something I'd wear and not feel like I am a walking ad.

Yeah, no one's going to wear a shirt that says Kagi on it. They'll wear a shirt with the mascot on it though

I definitely would, I generally don’t wear graphic t’s.

You're way too sure about other people's choices. I'd totally wear one.

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