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Comment by cyberlurker | Hacker News Reader

I pay for Kagi monthly and enjoy using it.

But this is ridiculously expensive: > $25 for 1000 queries

Perhaps this is just me, but in general I feel like Kagi is holding itself back with its pricing structure. 300 searches a month is not enough for me, and $10/month is too expensive for something I can get 75% of the value of for free elsewhere. I would have adopted it a long time ago if it were $5 a month, or you could pay per search.

I suppose they are choosing the customers they want and aren't growth focused. I wondered if they had any venture capital in them and was surprised to find they have a kind of community funding model where their investors are their users [0]. It's almost positioned as a luxury good, doesn't have to be better, it just captures the market that /wants/ to spend $10 a month on a search engine with the idea that they're funding a French atelier of bespoke software (and I say that as a subscriber :^)

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/

seems somewhat reasonable, if frustrating. I wish there was a mid-ground between this model and the ad-exploitation bonanza that every other search is based on

> But this is ridiculously expensive: > $25 for 1000 queries

Depends for what use case. For traditional everyday queries, it does sound expensive indeed, if you're not recovering any of the spend from whatever you use the API for.

Over a year ago they said something along the lines, that they pay around 1-2ct per search query (for API calls to the different search providers they use). If this is still true, then this seems to be fairly priced.

Though If the API will get available, I won't use it as much as I want to.

I have ~1700 searches per month and use the professional plan (10$/month), which would be 1.7*$25 = $42.5 per month, which I'm glad I don't need to pay.

ridiculously expensive. yep. starter pack:

300 searches per month $5/mo

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