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Comment by wrasee | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing.

But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter.

I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.

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The "right way"[0] to use Kagi is the unlimited search tier ($10/mo) and then aggressively rank domains in searches. Within a few weeks, the search quality improves tremendously, because I have filtered out the domains responsible for low-quality results, and up-ranked the domains I find to be most useful.

[0]My opinion. Probably true.

My opinion too.

There’s also the idea of vote with your wallet. What we spend can be a tool to change the landscape. Enough people paying $10/mo. for Kagi might keep a good, ad-free option in business.

Similar to why many people pay for OpenOffice and Ubuntu. They want them to keep existing.

FYI OpenOffice is pretty much a dead project; nearly all development effort shifted years ago to LibreOffice.

That’s the one I was talking about. Thanks for the correction. :)

I suppose my argument was essentially that $5/month felt on the high side, so I love that the answer is actually to pay $10/month. This is the way.

In all seriousness, I am sure you are right and don’t deny the promise on offer. I’d also be willing to pay for search much more so than many other online services of more questionable value.

But I just don’t think they’re going to get cut-through at $5, not least $10, in the way they might exponentially do so if they could stretch to an entry tier that really starts to feel accessible to a much, much wider set of people.

WhatsApp took over the world at $1/year.

You've already spent more than $10 worth of your time arguing why you want a premium search engine for free. (Because let's face it, if it was $5 or $1, you'd still argue that it's too expensive).

Things cost money. Some people can't afford a certain product. Some people don't want a certain product. But you don't see people in the grocery store arguing all day why they don't want to purchase a certain product on the shelf.

A strange thing to say about a discussion forum, whose essential purpose is the discussing of things. There is absolutely social value in understanding what people are willing to pay for things. And if it’s cost me more than $10 to present my view, well let’s just call that a donation. You’re welcome.

And people spend a tremendous amount of time discussing the price of essential goods like groceries. Economists go bananas of it. Especially in some regions with a cost of living crisis. What a strange example to make.

I don't agree with the idea that $5 is on the high side.

After infrastructure and DNS, I think it's the most important tool for using the internet (at least for most people in most cases). It's what most people use to actually find information. It saves me uncountable hours each year.

Need to find a phone number to a company? I don't have to guess what their domain is, I just search for "<company> Phone Number" and probably land on an "About Us" page.

Need to find an owners manual to a device? I don't need to browse for 20 minutes on the product vendor's website.

Trying to look up an error in code? I don't have to search Github, StackOverflow, Gitlab, that tiny self-hosted forum for the library throwing an error, and Reddit individually.

And ultimately, ad-supported search presents a conflict of interest: what information should the search engine return to you? A near-exact result you're looking for or advertiser-funded results to be presented first? Whoever provides search has to raise money somehow, and they aren't going to sell ads if the advertiser results are always at the bottom.

Lastly, Hackernews seems primarily geared towards North America/Western Europe/AU(?)/NZ(?). For this area, generally, $5 is not unreasonably expensive.

Agree with all of that. I would love for Kagi to be the future of search. Let’s hope that they can do so at $5/month.

My hunch is that they are happy just growing a sustainable business. And I say good for them.

I'd wonder if they'd be better off hiding the 300-search option from the pricing page, in that it immediately sends people to thinking about "can I deal with search as a metered resource?" Arguably it derails the conversation about paid search entirely.

Another idea might be if they partnered with some other service provider so they were a line item on something people are already comfortable paying for. I could imagine a cross-promo where you paid a few bucks extra a month when subscribing to like Fastmail or Proton to get Kagi with it. There's likely a fair cross appeal there.

I also pay for Kagi and i'v never been happier with my searches. It's so nice not to have to slog through Google bullshit results. Kagi results are great and you can tweak the behaviour deeply to your liking. I'm also proud to support an alternative from a smaller company with same beliefs instead of Google who does a lot of damage to the medium i love be it ads or Chrome. So the few bucks are a no brainer. It's the same as paying for any other monthly subscription

Correction: $6.05 (in my case)

A while ago they sent me an email saying "we grew enough that now we are obliged to collect VAT from you", so the actual final price grew a bit.

I run out of the 300 searches/mo in around ten days. Everyone raves about Kagi but I've paid for it around three times now, and it's never been better enough than DDG to justify the $10/mo for me...

Very different experience for me, I’ve tried to switch to DDG many times and always switched back to Google after being disappointed.

Using Kagi for a year now and only a handful of times I’ve checked if Google would give better results.

Same for me. Also like and regularly use Quick Answer feature (similar to Perplexity).

$5 is practically nothing. $2 is just not worth the cost of the CC charge.

I think it’s really convenient that you can pay for extra searches, as you never have to worry about actually running out.

They also need to be able to pay for the servers that run searches.

> $5 is practically nothing

That’s quite a privileged thing to say. This forum is read by folk all across the world and I would say that it’s up to each individual to say how much $5 means to them.

Don’t get offended on behalf of other people

I’m not. I’m pushing back against folk that forget not everyone thinks the same as them. That “$5 is practically nothing” reads like a statement of fact, which is obviously ridiculous depending on where you’re from.

And yes, it definitely has a “let them eat cake” vibe which is absolutely worth a push back.

$5 was barely anything even when I was a student. Sure, there’s places in the world where it’s still a lot of money, but (good) search is a valuable service. Google proves that.

If someone does not want to pay $5 then they’re perfectly within their rights to do so, but saying it’s “a lot of money” feels like pinching pennies. By comparison to any other plan that’s practically the lowest you’ll ever see.

$5 is nothing for Americans. Here in Spain with much lower purchasing power it's considerable and there's VAT added too.

So how long do you usually consider whether you're spending $5 or not?

It's not about how long, it's about how often you decide not to do it. Which for me is pretty often.

$5 is not one coffee here. It's about 4 coffees in a coffee bar. And that $5 is without VAT so that's enough for another coffee :) So basically it's a whole working week of morning coffees. To put it into perspective.

This is why I think it has more chance to take off in America than here. Though northern European countries do have a lot more money.

That totally makes sense. If we are estimating your purchasing power at 1/4x mine (I'm located in California and make decent money but not tech industry type money) I can see paying 40$ for the unlimited tier being much more of a consideration.

What does keep me paying personally though are three things:

1. I use search constantly for my job (and personal life) and Kagi makes me much more efficient compared to Google for both. I could easily filter out most ads for free with other tools - the ad free nature of Kagi is more of a plus on top personally than a main selling point.

2. While I generally avoid subscriptions 10$ per month is very little spread over days worked in a month. I comparatively probably spend much more for other things that benefit my job and personal life and bet you do too (better laptop - more reliable internet - etc etc). Even at 40$ a month (given your example) I would imagine it's a net benefit in terms of time savings per hour vs salary earned.

3. They are very transparent about new features and bugs fixed and blog updates and also are adding new features at a very impressive pace. There are lots of little things added that improve the experience and I don't see them buying into trends just for hype - everything's seems highly useful.

I also mostly drink loose leaf tea at home which can be either a hell of a lot cheaper than a daily coffee shop visit in either of our countries (mid tier tea in bulk) or a hell of a lot more expensive (fancy tea bought from smaller vendors). If I am ever going through a financial down period I can easily see myself choosing to go exclusively with the cheap bulk tea and keeping Kagi - total cost per work day for both would less than 50 cents USD / day.

Yes I think that's a good estimate, especially compared to California which is already high on the wage level even by US standards.

I think it's also that for me search isn't a huge deal. I probably could easily get away with the $5 plan, I don't think I do 300 searches a month.

Even when I have computer issues I try to figure them out and searching is more of a last-resort. My goal is to have a deep understanding of how things work. And that pays off too, I have kinda a reputation at work "If you can't figure it out, talk to him".

But yes it's nothing compared to what I spend on hardware and other software (I donate to some FOSS projects I use a lot, like KDE).

However in terms of services I'm very very focused on self-hosting, hence SearXNG appealed to me a lot more than Kagi. Not even because of the cost, but because of the above: I like to deeply understand and be able to control the tech I work with.

Maybe I will use kagi some day, but for now I'm happy with what I have. But yeah the cost for me would be a bigger factor in that decision.

And in terms of coffee: I brew it at home too of course. But for us at work it's not just about the coffee, it's a social moment. Every morning there's a message going around: "We're just going down to our friends" by which they mean the girls in the coffee shop across the road. We then sit outside for 20 minutes taking a cofee and some of us smoking one. It's nice and not as forced as like a "standup" talk.

So one week of coffees is not worth great search for a month? I dunno, as much as I love coffee I can do without. And I can certainly do without 5 out of every 30 days.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t decide against it. Just challenging the assertion that 5 coffees constitutes a large amount of money (I think I can get 7 coffees in Japan for my $5).

No probably not for me. I really don't use search an awful lot. It's not that important to me for my internet use. What I do a lot is read sites like HN here and find things I like and then dig down and keep notes. My notes are higher in my priority and I do for example pay the $4 monthly for Obsidian notes (though I'm considering to set up my own sync server, not really to save costs but to have more understanding and control). And that's while I have OneNote available to me too (but I don't use it anymore because it's terrible especially on Linux where only the web client is available).

But search, it's just not that high in priority in my workflow.

The coffee thing was just to put the Silicon Valley: "It's just one starbucks coffee" into perspective, to show it's not like that all over the world :)

Now I understand. You don't want the product and you're not interested in that kind of product. Then of course any price asked is too expensive for your taste. I don't like breakfast cereal. That doesn't mean that they're too expensive, it just means I'm not the customer. But there are people who like the product and to them the price asked is cheap.

When I go to the super market I walk past thousands of products which I'm not interested in. The same for any store or virtual market place. So it's not about $5 being a "considerable" amount.

Hmm if it was $20 per year I'd do it. Just saying. I'm not interested in the product for the price. It's just not $60 per year important to me.

I don't know about Spain, but $5 is enough to sustain me for half a day (I spend roughly $10 a day all things considered). There are many places out here where people have it much worse than we do. I will fret over spending an additional $5 per month for hours (by looking for alternatives, etc). GP is right, much of HN audience is extremely privileged and doesn't even recognize it.

Is somebody extremely privileged because they have $5? Or are you just upset that people would spend $5 differently than you would?

If you spend $10 per day, how can $5 be anything to fret about for hours? You're losing more spending your time fretting about it right?

Sometimes, a person might "have more time than money", in which case the 'cost' of spending time may be considerably cheaper than the cost of spending money. I also presume that the fretting was not monotasking.

Problem isn't that $5 is expensive (in most of the Western World) it's that $5 for the 10 hot tools this month starts to add up to a lot.

The US is also a huge outlier in salaries compared to the rest of the western world.

But search is not just another service, a hardly noticeable addition to the daily internet experience. Much like a browser is not just another app you barely use.

Search is central to my internet experience. If there is one service worth paying for, it should be search. But for that it should be better enough than ad-supported options to be worth the subscription. I think Kagi has got so close that I should start shelling $10/mo for it.

(Another service I think is a no-brainer to pay for is YouTube, mostly because ad-ridden YouTube is insufferable.)

According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.

If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable.

The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?

It if supporting each customer costs them, say, $2.50

for each Kagi search they hit APIs of other search providers etc., so they need to cover that cost.

Except for these types of services scale is in your favour. A bakery has a high cost of goods sold, whereas services like this tend to have high fixed costs but relatively light costs per customer. So scale is very much to your advantage (within reason).

because they have to pay for queries to other APIs for each search, COGS is relatively high I think, which is counterintuitive for a web product like this.

my sense is their fixed costs are relatively low.

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