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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

I get paying for a search engine rather than having it be ad-supported. And I get that running all those servers costs a fair chunk of change. But the cost just seems insane -- $10/month? That's on par with a streaming service that needs millions of dollars to make content. I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value.

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I disagree - I don't think $10 / month is insane. Our low price expectations are driven by SaaS companies optimizing for growth, not profitability. Look at some of those "affordable" products out there: Slack, Asana, Shopify, all not profitable. The biggest surprise here, I think, is that VC-driven "growth first" companies have shifted customer expectations to think that everything should either be free or sub-$10 / month. The economic reality, however, looks quite different, if companies would aim for profitability (not many in the HN bubble do).

I won't blame VCs but the 0% interest rate environment.

When money had no "price" to it, it made absolute sense to borrow as much as possible from the future, and thus delaying profits for growth.

That's why we start seeing this world change now, rates are no longer 0 and money isn't free. You have to pay now, and so you have to have some cash flow now.

If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you, it adds up to the point where we'd all have to start touching grass for most of the day while general purpose computation becomes more exclusively for the affluent. I mean maybe that's a good thing but it feels pretty radical from status quo

That touches on the general dissatisfaction many people have with cloud-first subscription based software. For a service like kagi, it makes sense since search needs that model. When software that doesn't need to doesn't depend one someone else's computer, the good old one time purchase option at large enough scales with optional upgrades every few years becomes more viable again.

If we get technical enough you can have a decentralized search index that's automatically distributed in a torrent-like manner so it's possible with some AI models that eventually, after a year or so, you almost don't hit the network when you search.

But nobody from the business circles wants that outcome.

We’d have a totally new equilibrium. Where would the money currently spent on advertising go?

If distributed equitably, you’d imagine we, as consumers, might not actually be worse off in net; instead of coming from advertisers, it gets sent through us to the same software companies that we currently pay by proxy through advertising.

> If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you

Except that it shouldn't. The software I use every day is not a service that incurs ongoing costs to the developer. A one-time fee is the correct model for that.

More and more services ask for money -- really, it was about time they stopped pretending the VC money will never dry up, and I approve that they are finally waking up.

But notice the "more and more" part. $10 is nothing but we also have to take into account how many times we have to multiply $10 each month.

And that equation started becoming unfavorable for us the consumers.

I pay for Kagi and I honestly feel that I get more than my money's worth out of it. YMMV, of course. Maybe it isn't worth it to you.

But for me, Kagi opened up the web again. I can finally find what I'm looking for. I can make sure that my results never include BS websites. I even got serendipity back in my searches.

In a sense, the $10/mo I pay is really for access to the web itself. Without Kagi, most of parts of the web I was interested in were almost entirely unfindable.

But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.

> But... you don't have to pay for it. You do need an account, but Kagi has a free tier.

It’s a trial, you get 100 searches for free, then you have to start paying.

I don’t think you can call it a free tier but it’s a nice offer to evaluate the service before paying. I tried it for a bit and wasn’t happy with the search results, but I might try again though and use up my remaining searches.

I double checked because I was about to correct you, and you're right, but I could've sworn it used to be monthly (still low limit, but resets) so maybe GP remembers that too. Or perhaps it just wasn't as clear that it was a one-time trial before, and we both misread.

Looks like it used to be a free plan with a usage limit when they first launched in 2022:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221111171736/https://kagi.com/...

Ah, I wasn't aware that this had changed. There used to be a free tier that just limited the number of searches you could do per month.

Kagi is one of those things that immediately clicks once you actually use it.

Then you do a quick cost benefit analysis: how much money am I really saving when I use a "free" search engine that is intentionally shitty? If it takes me 2 hours to find a solution to something that took kagi 10 minutes,I've effectively saved almost 2 hours of my time and money. I can actually be more productive. Less headaches and frustration too.

What's insane to me is that Kagi is so good for the relatively little funding they have. Maybe when they have the subscriber numbers of Netflix they can reduce their monthly fee (not that I even personally think they need to), but for now I'm quite happy to pay them for a good service.

I'm increasingly a big fan of very direct revenue models. I pay for the product. I am *not the product*.

It's not just search either, their summariser tool is great, their Mac browser Orion is really impressive, and their attitude in general - eg. promoting signal over noise in everything they do (see Kagi Small Web), is just extremely refreshing.

It would be worth it at 10x the price.

$10 is a couple of cups of coffee or a cheap lunch in my area. I use Kagi a dozen times a day for work. The value proposition is very good. Every once in a while I’ll use a computer that doesn’t have Kagi and remember how much Google stinks these days.

Eventually Google is going to wise up and cut off Kagi’s API access. But until then I’m very happy to pay $10/month for greatly improved search.

Lol at 10 times? What about 100 times? Does it start losing value?

Google is not worried about a paid search engine that indexes less and if they were they would buy kagi. And yes Kagi would sell.

People aren't always as money motivated as that. The founder of Kagi is pretty intent on making it work well. And given the way they're raising I don't think money is the pure driver, but making the business sustainable. I wouldn't believe they haven't had offers already.

$10 is half a day's wage where I live. Do I not deserve internet search?

Let's be real here, 10 bucks is what you spend on a not even very great sandwhich. It's not insane to pay that for what is one of the more important tools in modern life.

Its 10 bucks. For a tool that searches the sum of human knowledge. Your ancestors would be ashamed.

If you're paying more than 10 bucks for a sandwich, you're getting robbed. If you're paying $10 a month for technology that used to be free everywhere, and that worked in the previous millennium, you're getting robbed.

You're right, but it's not Kagi Search that is doing the robbing: it's all the ad-tech aggressors of the last decade plus.

It was never free. You just weren't paying directly for it.

Would you pay $10 for the best sandwich in the world? It's just a sandwich, but it's the best in the world. Would you pay $10 for the best search engine in the world? It's just a search engine, but the best in the world.

I use Kagi an order or two of magnitude more than what I use the streaming services I pay for.

It's a small operation with no VC money to dump prices and subsidise it for you, it's very in line to what I imagine paying for under these conditions.

This is hard to argue. 10 USD can be a lot of money for poor people, especially those in less wealthy areas of the world.

I've recently trialed Kagi, was happy with my first 100 searches, so I went for the 300 option for 5 USD/month. Unfortunately, I used that up pretty quickly. What I often do is start a search, then do a better query. And so on. I went back to DDG (though I never see adds w/that).

It is unlikely I will stick to it though. I hate having to log in in private browser mode, and for me it is worth 5 USD/month but not 10 USD/month.

Btw, the dog is hilarious. And I don't even like dogs!

> I hate having to log in in private browser mode

You can configure a private browser session link [1] which prevents having to log in in private mode. I use in on both chrome and Firefox on my desktop, and on Firefox mobile on my android smartphone.

[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/private-browser-sessions....

Theoretically, you're not just paying for the lost revenue on serving ads and/or server costs, but also the lost revenue on harvesting your personal data.

Most of it goes to Google.

I am based in central Europe and Kagi is less than 1/2 of my hourly rate per month. And it definitely saves at least that much.

Really? I was ready to ditch Google not pay them through third parties. Oh well..

I totally get you, but we both have work to do and through Kagi it's easier and more respectful to our attention spans.

Google is getting the money either way. At least for now.

Isn't it a matter of scale still though? Presumably search engine cost could be much less per account once you have as many users as Netflix has. Assuming a large chunk of the cost of Kagi is the quality and curating, not just sheer server OPEX.

(Maybe a bold assumption, I don't have insight.)

Google makes about 200bn per year in advertising revenue (see quarterly figures here: https://searchengineland.com/google-ad-revenue-q4-2023-43704...).

The world’s population is about 7.8bn, with about 60% of people being online (https://ourworldindata.org/internet).

If we assume that about 90% of people use Google, that’s about 4.2bn people using Google search.

200/4.2 = 48 USD per year per person.

So, 120 USD per year is more than the implicit cost of using Google, but it’s in the ballpark. I think the 48 figure would increase if you adjusted for people primarily accessing the internet through facebook, whatsapp, or youtube, which I would guess is quite common.

Kagi claims that Google themselves peg it at 300 USD per user per year.

That includes other sources of revenue, I believe; although I could be wrong. Do you have a source?

If you really want to have a good option for ad-free search engines, you will need to pay more than what search engines could get from ad revenue. And this is a non-trivial amount; Google's ARPU is reportedly more than hundreds bucks. Given its scale, Kagi might be running at loss even with $10/month...

Those streaming services have other revenue sources like embedded advertisements which underwrite large amounts of those production costs.

Essentially $10 to take out the garbage, because the one that did it for "free" is doing a bad job at it.

> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or

why is that hard to imagine? the fixed costs of a search engine are enormous, and Google has 1) coming on three decades of investment in sunk costs and 2) billions of users now.

> providing that much value.

that's obviously a personal judgement you have to make for yourself.

having a quite good search engine that is happy to just take my money in exchange for a useful service is definitely worth three coffees/month to me.

> the cost just seems insane

My kagi subscription is literally the best value subscription or recurring-charge item I have in any part of my life, online or offline.

$10/mo was the price to lure in the masses years ago, they all cost more than that now for ad-free viewing.

In any case, price is not reflective of streaming's actual economics because those were either subsidized by VCs (Netflix) or are an arm of a corporate behemoth (Apple, Amazon, Warner Bros) that can afford to lose money there in exchange for customer acquisition.

* It's a gallon of grass-fed milk every month.

* It's a car wash every month.

* It's two mid-range store-bought frozen pizzas every month

* It's one Febreeze plug-in air freshener complete with 2 oil refills every month

* You would be out just over 300 matches per month if you instead put that money towards Kagi.

* And in homage to A Tiny Armageddon it is about 500 plastic spoons per month.

two cups of coffee from Starbucks

I just don't get these coffee comparisons. I don't know about you but I get free coffee at work on location, and at home the coffee is reasonably good that a Starbucks is not worth it.

It's about 2 bunches of Bananas (4)

4. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000711211

Ha! We buy bananas every week, my daughter and I love them.

2 bunches of bananas cost 3,10 EUR [1]

2 bunches of organic, fairtrade bananas cost 4,38 EUR [2]

Since AFAIK there is one genus I just buy the regular ones. Since we eat one bunch of bananas a week, it is about 6,4 weeks of bananas.

My bananas come from South-America. They have to travel further than the ones going to North-America. So they should be cheaper at your place (US?).

Then again, you pay nothing for gas, so it evens out :P

[1] https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi197393/ah-bananen-tros

[2] https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi368480/ah-biologisch-f...

> Since AFAIK there is one genus I just buy the regular ones.

That's correct, but neither 'organic' nor 'fairtrade' means that it would be a different (better) variety. Organic = not sprayed with chemicals for pest control for example; fairtrade = farm hands not paid exploitative rates (paid more).

(Not that I'm preaching you should care about either more, I'm a fairly price-driven shopper.)

In fact ceteris paribus in general you could argue you might expect that organic variety to be worse for taste, since pest/disease resistance has played a larger role in its selection.

I'm not sure that actually works in practice though, because ceteris never is paribus, it commands a premium, it's a somehow more discerning shopper perhaps/on average, so it's more worth choosing a nice tasting/attractive variety vs. the regular one selected for yield.

To explain the coffee comparisons, people like to buy coffee as a daily expense around the 3-5$. not exclusively starbucks, but it is a part of many people’s routines. so its a useful frame of reference for most people. hope this helps

Well at home you get the coffee from somewhere, compare to that? I buy a bag of I think 250g beans for £7.95 (about $10 I suppose, conveniently) and without travel I probably get through at least four bags in a month.

That's much more coffee that Kagi costs than if I was getting it at Starbucks, but it still puts it in perspective I think. (And the coffee tastes much better.)

Or about 1/30th of your salary, here.

> I just can't see even the best search engine either costing that much to run or providing that much value.

How many thousands of hours did you save by using Internet search, compared to having to go to a library and find that information in books?

Even if you value your time at some laughable amount, like $1/hr, Kagi (or any other alternative) would still be worth it.

Also, $10 just isn't what it used to be. It doesn't even get you a fast food meal anymore.

A combo at In-n-Out is around $7 IIRC. And that's in California.

They pay google and others for search data, and those are expensive. For example, google charges $5/1000 query: https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/906910...

I agree. I just can't justify it. Been trying to convince myself for a while. Even if it cost $0.01 a search that's 10000 queries. Kagi is $5 for the first 300 that's very pricey for only 10 searches a day. $10 I get the feeling is cheaper in the USA than it is in Europe purchasing parity or earnings wise.

1000, not 10000

My bad

I said the same thing when it was $20 per month, and caved in at $10.

If I had to choose, I'd probably give up Netflix before I give up Google, even if Google decided to fuck it and charge everyone $10/month for searches.

Search is just that valuable to me.

How much people are willing to pay for something is deeply influenced by the competitors' price point, which in search, is zero, because Google exists. Whereas Netflix's competitors (apart from piracy) are more or less offering the same deal.

You have to be specifically interested in Kagi's selling point over Google to want to pay for Kagi, rather than needing search in a general way.

Actually I think comparison between piracy and Netflix is a good example here. Piracy is free but it needs some arrangement and you go though sources that is not safe, spam and malware. This is true on case of Google searched which is full of ads (that sometimes phishing attacks) spam and AI crap now. Kagi makes it much easier to actually get what you want.

And as always you can't have your cake and eat it too. You will need to pick what is important for you.

This is a précis of how software gets so bad -- people refuse to pay for the value it delivers to them, so the software vendors naturally look for other ways to make money. And the advertising starts.

If you don't want enshittification, then you need to pay for the things companies build for you.

They have a 5 per month plan as well.

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