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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

$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.

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> $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.

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