Fair Pricing | Hacker News Reader

Fair Pricing

kagi.com

1,134 pointsCleverLikeAnOx498 comments

This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it.

So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you would be with a new subscription.

Furthermore this generates goodwill, and I'm guessing goodwill has some % that converts to conversions and lower churn.

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

Plus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.

You can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.

They send by default an email every month when the payment time is approaching, so I assume they may just send the same email and state that the payment amount is covered by the previous month. They have really good practices at that.

tbh, these e-mails can also prompt unsubscribing. because then I actually remember that I am still subscribed to that thing.

Yet Kagi is one of the very very few services I've seen that sends a monthly reminder that they are ABOUT to charge you... And you have time to stop it. Typically I only ever see something like that with shipped goods where they might have to deal with a return + cancellation

That's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in order to find something that should be one of the first results. This may just be a better model.

Kagi is so much better. You should just try one of the lower tier subscriptions for a while and see what it's like.

Just for warning, you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper local results, but generally the experience with Kagi is much better.

> you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper local results

And can do so by adding !g to a Kagi query, just like on DDG.

You know, I once ordered takeout from the other side of the country because I had too much privacy on my search engine...

That's funny. I'm curious now, do you live in a microstate, or an island? Or was it a case of an overly eager delivery platform?

My favorite is that I've now had multiple services that don't warn you prior to renewing an annual subscription.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery subscription reminds you when there are about to charge you.

People also forget that they're subscribed to something (or that they signed up for emails either explicitly or implicitly), so they just report to Google (or whoever) as spam. I'm sure that's why I get a lot of email (mostly in my Gmail Promotions or Updates tabs that are from companies that scanned me at some event or whatever or I ordered something from.

not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...

Once you are navigating these waters, it might pay to ask for a definition of ‘active’.

This is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake.

I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.

Technically, they do

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149

But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as you're imagining

No need to really - users + revenue is enough to figure it out. And you want to see revenue anyway.

(I'm one of those small investors in Kagi.)

I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.

The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.

> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.

Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.

A thoughtful investor will be more interested in paid active users and cohort analysis of retention (in terms of actual usage) rather than subscription numbers/revenue in absolute terms.

Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.

And they don’t usually ask for number of subscribers, but number of paid subscribers. Startups have played enough games with this that investors should be able to hone in on the right numbers.

Correct, your churn would be artificially lowered, so you'd probably want to define a point where a "paused" subscription is effectively inactive and count that against churn.

It would still show in other metrics, however, as you'd have monthly active users (or accounts), which would take a hit. You'd also see a drop in MRR when an account is paused.

Bear in mind I'm assuming a business that wants clear, accurate metrics so the executive team know what actions to take; not simply a business looking to scam investors out of money ;-)

I've had places offer to just not bill for a few months while still allowing full access or offer some steep discounts in the workflow for cancelling in attempt to reduce churn.

If you ever dealt with the business side of SaaS you know how important churn is.

Growth = New Customers Acquisition - Churn. New customers are expensive for many businesses to get, they have marketing, sales, and promotion related expenses. It makes sense to spend money to reduce churn too, because it’s a cheaper way to boost your growth rate.

If you offer deals to reduce churn, you need to focus on if those deals are just delaying inevitable churn or if they are actually winning back customers. Delaying churn is just a game of spending money to make your books look better for a quarter.

Yes but it’s also a chance to convince the customer that you’re worth keeping around. Depending on your product, you might also have customers that dip in and out. Keeping them from churning, while sacrificing a little cash today, helps keep that customer from shopping around for alternatives, too.

Also, in my experiences most of those services which offered free time or heavily discounted alternatives to cancelling tend to be things which have a pretty low cost per subscriber (e.g., news sites, simple applications, not much per-user storage).

I agree with your statement but your general calculation of growth is off imho, it should be: Growth = (New Customers Acquisition + Install Base Growth) - Churn This also assumes that churn = Customers that leave completely and those that downgrade plans

IB growth can fuel business growth, especially during times of low new customer acquisition and or high to moderate churn

A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.

I somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin toss which one the website would send me to. I only found out because I canceled one of them, and then still got billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the double-sub period.

Ans any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.

guess we'll have to switch back to ARPU now...

AFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to any investor.

Kagi has taken some investment, mostly from its users: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round

Disclosure: I work at Kagi

Then thank you for the service. I'm using Kagi since a few months and I love you guys!

more importantly it's kind to the users

(historically not so important to companies in practice, but it sure ought to be)

> We have implemented this for the simple reason of being kind to our users.

Sometimes the simplest explanation is also the correct one.

This will come out in due diligence if the investor is not just throwing money at whatever moves.

If the streaming services did this, I would probably have a lot more of them.

If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream.

Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.

I... really like this idea. It's an interesting problem and something that a challenger service could possibly use (assuming they can resolve potential cash flow issues around content licensing). From an incumbents' perspective, it's less desirable since the fact I already have Netflix, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Apple TV makes me less inclined to add Disney+ or a new service to my list of monthly outgoings.

There's a separate cash flow problem on doing this, a big chuck of the expected revenue comes from people that setup the subscription and forget about it

I tend to care lot less on keeping something like dropout even if I don't use it all the time (I like to think I contribute keeping it afloat, and watch it whenever), but I cancel other subscriptions a lot more aggresively (I've unsubbed/resubbed to Gamepass plenty of times specially when playing random stuff with friends, there's something nice of the exploratory playing you do when you don't need to care who has bought which game)

On the pattern I use dropout, they'd get a month or two of revenue out of me (Binge a couple of their limited runs and catch up on their staples) and zilch for the rest of the year even if I'm a happy customer

It's an interesting point, because it gets to when streaming services' content costs are paid.

Are they upfront? Or do they pay per view royalties at the end of a streaming period? Or likely mix of both, varying by each piece of content terms?

Hypothetically, if a streaming service structured most of their obligations in the form of post-view true-up's, they wouldn't have any problem doing this. And could make bank on the float between customer payment (first of month) and paying for their content (end of period).

Streaming services mostly pay for licensed content up front. That’s why video streaming is much more like a traditional tech company - high up front costs with very low marginal costs compared to streaming music companies where their costs stream linearly with their revenues

For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to pad out the offering. Then it depends on the deal, but often the amount that each item is watched then contributes to the royalties cost. The relative exclusivity you might want will then dictate the overall cost and royalties returned.

For sports it's different, typically you bid for the right to own a geographic market and the games are sometimes split into bundles where you can bid for one or all bundles depending on how deep your pockets are. You'll then get to keep exclusive or non-exclusive rights for a certain number of years. You'll then pay annually/quarterly for that right at the total bid package for the term of the deal (e.g. 5 years). Depending on the contract you might be able to re-sell that right to other companies as well, which dilutes your audience, but may increase the distribution overall.

Then aside from the rights, you end up paying infrastructure costs both fixed and variable. You also generally commit to CDN capacity for distribution based on a forecast of how much you think your customers will watch in any quarter.

Fascinating! Thanks! I figured someone here would know modern practice.

I was flummoxed the other day when I talked with someone who was a content equity trader -- I didn't even realize that class of finance existed.

Pay for what you use streaming exists. I don't think it would work here. Paying a large sum and dividing it up by what you watch is basically back to cable tv, just with a little smarter more immediate billing -> analytics feedback for hollywood.

A change I think is necessary for consumers however is deduplication of content payments. If you subscribe to multiple services, youre paying for a license to some content multiple times, sometimes many times.

What I would like to see is more like Kagi Fair Pricing, a master payment account (like prime or movies anywhere) that has access to all your accounts, cross references where you are paying for a title multiple times, and offers a refund or credit.

It's a very slippery path towards per-watch pricing with "rent this episode for just $0.99"... and that will be horrible.

I wouldn't mind tbh, it's way better than ads and would keep me from watching bad content

Why would you otherwise watch bad content?

Why is that horrible?

The problems with per-watch pricing most come down to requiring a conscious decision each time they use your service, when you'd prefer that they be indifferent at most margins so that they don't have to be regularly reminded that oh, yeah, the amount of money they're spending on this darn this thing actually varies with how they use it.

Largely this breaks down into two salient factors:

- the friction of the transaction itself, which you largely shed when the consumer already has already agreed to be billed on usage, and

- metering aversion, which can be alleviated with a wide range of cheap tricks, e.g. using very coarse quantization: think not "rent this episode for just $0.99", but "rent up to 50 episodes this month for just $9.99". But the extreme of this is what you actually see: one price for any usage of the service at all, which ... is a popular pricing model at consumer scales because it works?

You can do this now with all the On-demand stores. But it quickly becomes more economical to buy a bundle.

At the rate I watch, this would save me money.

Digital rentals for movies have been a thing since 2006 with the first video iPod and still is. Apple tried that with TV shows. But no one wanted it.

Give it a reasonable enough price (0.99 per episode is too expensive) and add a monthly cap (can be a bit higher than the current subscription) and you've got me as a customer.

Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.

Fifteen years ago people were talking about micropayments per article for news services being just around the corner. What ever happened to that?

AFAIK it never pans out really. People turn out very stingy if they're faced with a decision to pay or not to pay for every article, so the revenues end up a lot lower than what the subscription model would pay.

A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an unsolveable problem, but there are significant network effects that would need to be overcome.

When people are confronted with the actual cost, they tend to say no. With a subscription, their head tells them that for 10 €/$ they get an infinite number of articles.

No, they get the articles that _you_ provide. But if _you_ provide only 50% of the interesting articles, as does every other provider, then approaching the ability to access 100% of interesting articles get very expensive. Just getting to 90% of the articles would cost 40€/$. And pushing that to 99% will cost 70€/$.

A ton of newspapers actually tried micropayments (something like 50c per article). Almost nobody was interested, consumers do not want micropayments.

I believe instead that the future for textual content is mass syndication, just like it worked out for video content and audio content.

God I fear the advent of Reportify and Poetify

I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch something else badly enough in another 6 months' time.

I do something similar and that's why I usually try to subscribe on my phone or iPad. iOS makes it so that I can start or stop a subscription in about 3 seconds. Sometimes it costs a little more because the services have to pay Apple, but for me, it's worth it.

Please tell me that you have at least a Bash script or Selenium workflow for this. It actually sounds like a fun project to abstract and make pluggable. It would probably require maintenance, though.

This would be my first use of AI agents. "AI, buy me 1 month of PBS".

I do this when we have visiting relatives who would spend all day watching a particular cable news channel that gets them all riled up. Before they arrive, I subscribe to a different streaming service with a package that doesn’t include that channel and put its icon front and center on our TV. I then immediately cancel it so it doesn’t renew.

Totally worth the $20 or whatever.

Then a particular show becomes a hit. And the company hasn't planned hardware for the spike in traffic because no one was using it before.

I hear torrent protocol scales rather well.

Basically you want per stream pricing.

Yes a lot of people does this manually. But the services predate on the people that is too busy or lazy to unsubscribe and I'm afraid they are a much larger group.

I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn’t really that much better than Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while just entering queries, and then the chance to find something better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might make more sense, especially if it’s designed not to blow through queries quickly and transparent about how many searches were actually done.

Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.

From kagi.com:

> No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search.

So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi target audience.

I get better results.

I block the shit (a user preference with some good easy options), I up rank my favourites and pin Wikipedia.

I’m happily paying for a family plan.

Oh yeah, in this political climate I'm definitely going to voluntarily tie my and my children's search results to my credit card. As long as people continue to gush about how amazing this service is, I'm going to gush about how ridiculuous this proposition is.

You think Kagi tracks you, to the risk of killing their business, but Google doesn't track you or collect data about your searches?

yes I do think there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class action suit about incognito mode. And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi. Plus, like 23andme, when times are tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company in dire straits will do with my dafa.

The difference is the business model.

Today, Kagi has a negative incentive to even historically track user search data (if discovered, their business would be cooked). Consequently, it's very likely they're being honest and don't.

Furthermore, they're building a sustainable business around subscription revenue.

In the event any of the above changes, they still won't have any historical data to share.

As opposed to Google, who keeps things in their vaults until the heat death of the universe.

> And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi.

Ha! You and what European data authority supporting you? Because that's the only way you'd have a chance of making headway.

> Today, Kagi has a negative incentive

Thank you for agreeing with me. Why would I bother using a VC-backed search engine today that forces me to login to use it routinely only to receive an email later saying, "An Update to our Terms of Service". And whose only way to convince me that they do not store my data is to tell me that I can "trust them." Even if I trusted them, I wouldn't trust their investors or their random late stage C suits.

>As opposed to Google

Are you willfully ignoring what I wrote in bad faith? Google had to settle a class action law suit that forced them to delete "billions of user records" and still allowed them get sued for individual claims down the road. Use kagi to search for the winston strawn summary of the case.

Here is an excercise: Open a three letter browser starting with the letter T, go to google.com and search for the life expectancy of ALS. Now close the browser.

Now tell me what google can deduce about about the real-life ethbrl with certainty and how they came by that information.

Are you hitting "New Identity" in the Tor browser, removing all cookies/sessions and creating a new circuit for each search?

In that case I guess there is not too much they can deduce aside from the type of device (desktop, mobile).

But of course, if you make more search queries without hitting "New Identity", they can piece together a lot more than that, including exactly who you are with enough time between new identities.

If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as well. There is even a Hidden Service for it [1], so you don't even need to hit the clear web at any point.

If you're concerned about tying your credit card information to your searches, you can just use a prepaid debit card or crypto to pay [2].

[1]: http://kagi2pv5bdcxxqla5itjzje2cgdccuwept5ub6patvmvn3qgmgjd6...

[2]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html

>If you're going so far, you can use Kagi from Tor as well.

I have to remind you we're talking about preventing Kagi or Google from tracking you. This suggestion makes no sense when you're forced to sign-in to Kagi to use it meaningfully as your default search engine anyway no matter where you're connecting from.

Your first two paragraphs describe a use case that is way more convenient than your last paragraph, and most crypto wallets have most likely come into contact with exchanges that have the user's kyc data to begin with.

I'm not sure you appreciate how small "billions of user records" is for Google.

Again, you seem to be missing the point here. Those "billions of user records" are the users who thought they were not being tracked by using incognito mode. All the other users who didn't care about being tracked one way or the other are irrelevant to the use case we're discussing.

Your point seems to be arguing in favor of how a company whose core business product is tracking... makes you more comfortable you're not being tracked than an alternative with a subscription model?

>Your point seems to be arguing in favor of how a company whose core business product is tracking

I'm doing no such thing. I'm merely pointing out that a user still has tools in their disposal to prevent a company whose core business is tracking from tracking them as long as said company does not require the user to sign in with PII info.

When you sign in with Kagi, your only protection is to "trust them". Kagi's next move should be to allow mail-in-cash for account activation to back up their privacy intent if they require user sign-in, like some other privacy-focused services allow.

> there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free.

You’ve specified the difference. One company is actively trading your data as its core business, for profit. One isn’t. I find your position baffling.

> One isn't

No, one says it isn't at some specific point in time. Some people here seem to want to believe the last decade of bait amd switch VC backed startups never happened (often times through no fault of the founders).

>one is trading your data

As I mentiomed in my other comment, the user has tools at their disposal to prevent google figuring out its "your" data. No such tools exist when you're forced to sign into Kagi with your credit card.

Your position is baffling. You think that Google, who maintains every search you’ve ever made, including correlating them across every Gmail account you have, and who routinely provides this search data to authorities, as well as sells access to this data is somehow more safe to use than a company based in Europe, who are funded off of a subscription model, whom are not VC funded even though you claim that, and who’s entire sales strategy is that they don’t sell your data or even retain it.

Your position is completely devoid of logic.

Nothing in the comment you're responding to says anything about me using Google search or Gmail. In other comments I'm simple comparing the use case of using google search with an obfuscated connection and without ever signing into a google account with the use case of having to sign into Kagi. In that respect, I have no idea what you're talking about. If you're responding to another comment of mine please respond to that comment so I can better understand your point.

Nothing in any of your comments indicates that you are using an obfuscated connection to search Google at all. In that case there is little difference to using Google signed in or not, you are still trackable across numerous devices and your searches are correlated. So being signed into kagi has little difference besides them now being less incentivized to sell your information or track you in any manner.

I straight up get better results than current Google.

you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to convince me that their better within the free searches (I have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.

People see no tracking and just trust it nowadays? I'd much rather use a public SearX/NG instance than to trust something that claims to have no tracking and isn't open source. Same thing with DuckDuckGo.

What happened is exactly what's supposed to happen: You tried the product and didn't like it, so you didn't purchase it.

It's the same with test driving a car: If you don't like it, then don't buy it.

You test drive a 2022 Camry and now you can't test drive the 2025 model?

Why would you, if you extensively tested the 2022 model and considered it garbage?

Kagi is entirely dependent on giving the best search. Without it they would lose pretty much all customers.

"Privacy minded" customers is not a foundation for a business. They spend all their time complaining and accusing, and then after some time they cancel their subscription because spending $10 per month keeps them awake all night.

I have the opposite experience: I use Kagi a hundred times a day with always relevant results while the GPTs always hallucinate random crap. I guess it depends on how you search.

I think the real value is a combination.

Use LLM to sift through search results (including all the crap clickbait) and find the thing you're really looking for.

A bit like perplexity does though I run it locally with OpenWebUI and SearXNG.

I don't doubt you but this life experience is so far from my own I struggle to understand what you use that much search volume for. I maybe search for 4-5 things a day (based on my one stint paying for Kagi and their usage reporting and trying to use it everywhere, and this was before AI products were able to search on your behalf) which is what led me to cancel, I was usually not getting the paid plan value from it. A large amount of my searches today are often just fancy autocompletes for specific URLS on already known domains that I probably could have accessed without a search engine at all.

Do you pay for ChatGPT with built in web search? I’ve been paying for ChatGPT for two years. I just started using the ChatGPT extension for Chrome for search and it is so much better than Chrome.

According to my usage statistics, I use Kagi around 20-50 times a day.

    Date (UTC)   AI Tokens  Searches
    Feb 5, 2025  0          64
    Feb 4, 2025  0          43
    Feb 3, 2025  0          19
    Feb 2, 2025  0          24
    Feb 1, 2025  0          19

They don't seem to track any form of history, only the number of searches (since some of their plans have a quota). I pay for unlimited searches, but the stats are still interesting :)

Similar stats for me. It’s become an invaluable tool, sometimes I’ll use another browser that’s has Google as default and immediately notice how much worse it is — all the ads, irrelevant cards, etc. Kagi is like the way Google was 10 years ago, which is MUCH better… with the benefit of more personalization

I just wish they weren't hobbled by Bing's index.

I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.

It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".

My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.

> And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now

Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`.

[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...

Know of any good pre-built blocklist?

No, I’ve built mine from scratch and now I’ve ~450 patterns in it.

I prefer configuring that in the service itself so that it works the same on every device where I use it.

Yeah me too, you can export/import blocklists but it’s cumbersome to have to do it every time between devices.

I found it way better simply because you can blacklist garbage SEO'd sites.

There are also browser extensions like uBlacklist that can be used to do this on Google search results.

I'm not keen on browser extensions. If it does not work without extension, it does not work.

I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.

On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.

As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.

> Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.

What is the value of ChatGPT relative to Google? It's not obvious to me.

Is there a lot of feedback from companies that have switched to similar model ? (how much it improved churn, customer lifetime value etc.)

You are really underestimating how many users just forget they have such unused subscriptions, and how much of subscription based company monthly revenue is those that are not used at all.

There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.

That is what this effort is aimed at: sleezy status quo

I think this is maybe a bit simplistic. People forgetting to cancel means the price can be lower per-person. It's a little bit like how insurance is priced.

_Can_ is doing some heavy lifting. I mean, I'm not in the boardroom, but when was the last time a subscription got cheaper?

Forcing people to pay for something they are not using is a time bomb. This is a good thing and we should all be looking at how to do this.

Hey Google, I want my $2/month for 100GB subscription back. It had disappeared and only $20/month for 2TB plus subpar AI that I don’t use remains.

I'd prefer a pay-as-you-go / per API call / search pricing model... to something that if I use it just once, I pay full price for a month. Same rationale for AI in my IDE, I'm waiting for the pricing models to change

There are any number of plugins for all of the popular IDEs/text editors that let you use metered AI usage using an API key.

For VS code compatible plugins checkout Cline/Roo or just search for AI in the extensions.

Plugins will never match the possibilities of a deep integration. Those who build or fork VS code want the monthly fee because they make way more per customer

The downside is that price per unit will increase as minimum unit size goes down. You're essentially buying at a "retail" price whereas the monthly bundle is wholesale.

But the tradeoff would be worth it for sparsely used applications.

I pay $0.01 per MB on my phone data plan until I reach the unlimited plan value, then everything is free

I don't think you can guarantee that the price will go up. If I look at the API costs today, they do not have a sliding scale

I'm still waiting for a $150 refund from pieter levels from his crappy ai interior site, didn't log in once.

Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service.

Keep up the good work guys!

I'm in exactly the same situation as you.

I would really struggle going back to not having bad sites suppressed in search results!

My pitch to friends is that it’s like Google used to be before they started adding all the crap to their results and ignoring your search terms.

Really, it’s even better than that given the full feature set.

Note to self: Make something good enough that friends will feel the need to make up pitches for their friends to use said thing.

Really. In the case of Google it’s even deeper for me. For some reason the ruination of their search engine feels like a betrayal for which Kagi’s proliferation feels like justice.

Absolutely seconded.

What I also love is Vlad / the Kagi team's fierce neutrality. For example, there have been complaints about including results from certain indexes like Brave and Yandex, or about suicide, or other political / sensitive stuff and Vlad's response is virtually always a shade of "no matter what, we will display the results because we are a search engine foremost".

Oh and they have built-in CSS injection (under Settings > Appearance) which allows you to hide Reddit's crappy pre-translated search results. You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

You can also rewrite URL results. So AMP to non-AMP and reddit.com to old.reddit.com (Advanced > Redirects).

Meanwhile Google obfuscates even their divs to make blocking certain results (read: ads) more difficult.

Here's the CSS snippet hiding translations:

  /*
  Hide pre-translated webpages.
  "sri-group" is main result, "__srgi"  are sub results.
  You can append `:not(:has(a[href*="tl=en"]))` to allow English translations.
  */
  :is(div.__srgi, div.sri-group._ext_r):has(a[href*="tl="]) {
    display: none !important;
  }*

That's a big reason for me too; when I remember when DuckDuckGo blocked "tank Man" a couple years ago, at that point that I considered DDG compromised: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

I get a lot out of their regex redirect for their search results, notably redirecting reddit to old.reddit -- a lifesaver when searching on mobile.

We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324

You forgot to reply in that thread with a justification for saying DDG is not, effectively, just Bing. Would you like to share numbers this time, or back down? ;)

The chatter in search right now is related to AI-assisted answers, and we get 0 of that from Bing. Same with knowledge graph answers before that (which became the most prevalent search module on desktop), 0 from Bing. And same for the most prevalent search module on mobile — local results — 0 from Bing. We have hundreds of team members and millions of lines of code. We’re constantly working on search.

In terms of traditional web links, which year after year have become less and less of the search results page, yes, we primarily use Bing as an input in the same way Kagi primarily uses Google as an input. As Vlad has said publicly (most recently heard him on The Talk Show) and has been made clear from the US v Google case, it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to maintain a competitive index of web links. Only the biggest companies can afford that. Nevertheless, we still work on crawling and indexing, but the reality is small companies can not do it all themselves.

> The conversation about and innovation in the future of search right now is related to AI-assisted answers

I pay for Kagi and stopped using DDG because of the traditional search. That's the differentiating feature. The conversation around AI assisted answers is mostly hype -- but Kagi has those too, if I want them.

But no, I'm paying because I want traditional search that works, not an AI summary that's half wrong.

AI-assisted answers are completely optional on DuckDuckGo.

Also, I have no problem with Kagi -- we are actually investors in it. The more competition in the search market, the better.

Kinda sad to read this.

The future of search is search. The future of summaries is summaries. This should be a "youve lost your way" moment. And quite frankly, search already broke the directory, which needs a comeback as its own product. You should be able to search the web without needing to know to ask for what you dont know to ask for. Dont let summary break search the way search broke directory.

If I want an LLM in my search, its because I want to have a conversation with the search engine about how it got the wrong results, and explain WHY and have it use the conversation to build new filters to block the wrong results and surface the correct results. I then want to read the source.

Right now if you ask google if Anora has a post credits scene, it says yes, because somebody tweeted a joke answer. A good product would let me reply to it and tell it its mistake.

The reason summaries are even attractive in the first place is because search itself is returning such garbage. The answer should be fixing search not abandoning it. The "summary" should be below the heaader of the result. (You should also rewrite page titles, a la Techmeme.)

I also like traditional results, which is how I got into this in the first place (crawling myself). I meant the conversation right now is about AI-assisted answers, and just revised to make that more clear what I referring to.

In any case, I agree with you they should just be a part of the search results page. Where they should appear is actually an interesting question we are exploring right now, and are finding the placement is very query-dependent (middle, bottom, right, top), and maybe should be customizable in any case.

We have a feedback box next to every answer where you can provide that feedback, which we read. We try to avoid user-generated content in general as sources right now. And current customization can control how often they appear (including never).

I'm (obviously) a Kagi stan, but let me say that I actually like AI answers. Especially the way Kagi does it, where it stays out of your way, unless you add "?" at the end of a query.

One nit that I can see someone else already brought up, is that on Kagi you can't converse with Quick Answer. If it interpreted the query wrong or you want alternate information, you need to juggle new searches until you get the answer you're looking for.

I did not know this about Kagi!

I abhor sites that translate into English based on my IP. In one case (a job site), I blocked the endpoint for their translation service and that was that.

It is the primary reason I use Kagi. I have become horrified by the widespread use of censorship for political reasons in search engines like Google. I'm not a child. I can make up my own mind.

> You could do that via Violentmonkey / Tampermonkey, but that won't apply to devices that don't have it.

On iOS there is Modificator which allows to inject CSS and JS:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635358022

The problem is not showing stuff from Yandex, the problem is that by paying Kagi you Yandex by proxy and that is an absolute red line for many people.

same here, I need the highest tier available :)

I just disabled it today. I have issues searching for local stuff and the other thing - it works poorly with Safari, which is of course not their fault.

How is them not supporting Safari not their fault?

On iOS at least, Apple does not allow custom search engines in Safari and does not list kagi. So the kagi app redirects requests to a different one. Feels gross and dumb.

It really isn't that bad. Setup is really quick and I have not found cause to complain on mobile.

Same. It’s annoying that it’s required, but once configured it works just as I’d expect.

Safari has a set list of search engines, you cannot add to or remove from the list.

They currently "support" safari currently by redirecting the searches that go to your chosen search engine to kagi.com with an extension.

FWIW, Kagi makes a browser called Orion that comes with ad blocking packaged in and works exceptionally well.

It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.

I honestly can't imagine Kagi being worse than Google. At minimum, Kagi lets me derank and ban domains I don't like.

I haven't seen Pinterest in my search results for years and honestly that alone is worth the price of admission.

If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.

> If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.

I agree this is a critical feature, but uBlacklist does this with Google for free. Without uBlacklist I'd gladly pay $10/month just to have "Google search without Pinterest results," but fortunately that's not required.

This is the best feature of kagi. I still use google as a backup (there are a handful of large websites that only allow crawling from the big guys - reddit in particular), but the fact that I can ban experts-exchange, pinterest, and other horseshit is alone worth the price of admission.

Kagi doesn’t insert lies into the search results.[0] If that’s all it did better than Google, that alone would make it better.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42766725

It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google if I need local results / Google Maps.

What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.

fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.

Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.

Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo for many of us.

- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.

- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.

- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.

- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.

All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.

I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.

Ditto - I've been a paying user since June 22. I've basically used Google a handful of times since, and been disappointed each time. Well worth it.

I just wish the unlimited plan was $5 instead of $10

I too wish that the things I might spend money on were half the price.

I just mean that I've got a lot of subscriptions, and it would be psychologically easier to justify a $5/mo subscription over $10/mo for search.

Same. Kagi has been a breath of fresh air after suffering years of enshittification with other search engines whom are much more interested in your clickstream than providing you with quality results.

Good job Kagi et al!

Same here. I don't often feel the need to shill for paid products but Kagi is so good that I want to do everything I can to make sure it sticks around. It's like air in the sense that it's easy to forget how much I need it until I suddenly don't have it lol

I was sold when it helped me uncover pages I'd never read before about an extremely niche local history topic.

Me, too!

What I love most about this fair pricing is it makes it was more appealing to encourage my friends to give it a try. Thank you, Kagi!

Yeah was thinking just this. Looks like I do 600-900 searches a month with Kagi!

If you're comfortable sharing, what is your job/role, how does Kagi help with that (or is it more of a personal tool), and do you find it more helpful than something like Google + Claude (what I currently use and love)?

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated from their own side. Im subscribing just to vote with my wallet.

Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.

Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.

I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelling/subscribing each month.

I think both statements are somewhat true. And we can look to COVID to see some evidence of this because when everyone was suddenly home and wanting to consume TV, Netflix had to lower the bit rate on even their premium tier to keep up with demand.

If Netflix wasn’t relying on a degree of inactivity with in their infrastructure then they wouldn’t have needed to lower the bit rates.

It makes sense, when you think about it. Over provisioning is a common practice when dealing with expensive finite resources. For example ISPs have been doing this for decades, offering households higher individual bandwidth than is available if every household within a local radius was to fully max out their throughput. VMWare also offers this to allow individual VM to consume more RAM than the total available on the host.

The key is not to over provision so much that it becomes noticeable under “normal spikes” — and I think we can all agree that COVID was anything but normal.

I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.

You’re the main income source for the Netflix :)

Isn‘t this the classic gym subscription example? How many people have a subscription and actually don‘t use it. There is an episode of Friends about that.

About the fair pricing: Would love to have this also for my car lease ;) But more on a weekly bases.

I'd say about a good 25% at least of the global SaaS revenue is dormant "gym" accounts by now.

that's called car rentals :)

Yes but I want the car in front of my home :) I understand the concept that I pay also for the luxury to drive around whenever I want etc. It was more a musing ala eat the cake and have it :)

I see lots of short rentals that just idle on the street for days sometimes. Here the provider pays of course (and I assume it’s not in their interest).

With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA.

When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover these peaks.

When you have an unexpected trip though, e.g. suddenly needing to go to Ikea, a spur-of-the-moment trip, etc., that's when this all falls apart. In my town, this was then 40:60, favoring no cars being available.

In the end, I just bought a car. 5 days out of the week, it sits on the street and depreciates in value. We take it on trips for the weekends, though, and have been absolutely loving it.

[0] central Europe, don't really need a car for daily life, but it's nice to have sometimes

I live the rental only life and only when needed. That being said when I looked at buying a car, it would be cheaper if bought second hand as it basically doesn't depreciate unless you drive commercially. The key is getting something that is already old and with a lot of mileage. Adding 10% more mileage to a car with 100k+ miles and adding 3 or 4 years to a 15 year old car doesn't really depreciate, it's all the same value. So if you ride the wave of old second hand cars you can switch every few years and you can even sell them for higher than you got them in years where the second hand market moves up.

Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.

The flip side of that is that only a small fraction of their members could actively use their memberships or they wouldn't have enough space. The active members get their membership effectively subsidized by people who don't use their memberships.

Apparently up to 50% of a gym's sign-ups happen in the month of January due to new years resolutions, and January/February are the busiest months as a result, though the majority keep their membership even after their resolve to go tapers off.

Gym memberships are also a thing people think they should have more than they actually desire to use them. So many people want to be healthy and get in shape, but aren't committed to actually doing the work. So when it comes time to think about cancelling plenty of people keep the gym membership because they think theyshould use it but then don't make the time.

Whereas Netflix and other streaming? It's so easy to just stay in and binge watch. The logical thing to do is cancel when you aren't using it to avoid paying year round, but they bank on the combination of laziness (takes effort to cancel) and ease of use - if you watch even just once or twice a month it starts seeming worthwhile.

And I'd bet most users still make them money. There's a huge fixed cost to setting up a giant content streaming service like Netflix, and to acquiring their content catalog, but they've hyper optimized the distribution so I'd expect all but the heaviest users make them money. And with ad supported plans, watching more would mean they get to serve more ads and make even more money.

> Gyms get you by making memberships cheap and easy, and cancellations incredibly difficult.

I think that depends on your country. I’ve never had an issue cancelling my gym membership.

In Europe it's law to make cancellations as easy as signing up. Also using the same methods; so if you can sign up through the web it's not allowed to only offer cancellation by registered mail that must arrive on a full moon only.

It seems insane to me that this isnt the law everywhere.

It is more insane to me that we need a law for this.

5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.)

https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...

To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).

The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.

I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service cost for everyone else who does actually use it. If anything one should be the least sympathetic to their plight, from a welfare angle.

The business model you're actually looking for is a utility, or a pay-per-use model. Getting charged per API endpoint hit, or by TCP packets sent, or something. A subscription service is explicitly designed to avoid all that, because our brains like nice round predicable numbers. Sophisticated users everywhere use this model, but most of us have better things to be sophisticated all the time.

I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're rich" is a convincing argument.

Robin Hood and his Merry Men would beg to differ.

> The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn.

That's fine.

It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who would have to cancel because prices rose from 14€ to 16€. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass such a law, despite how it first appears.

This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is just another word for people leaving when the costs exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed, other than the occasional service that has such obvious and widespread value that customers never unsubscribe. I struggle to think of examples of those services, where neither I nor anyone I know would want to unsubscribe. I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass (up to and including cancelling cards because it was easier).

>[I]t's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it

You characterize my position exactly right. I only point out there are many options people might not use Netflix for two months beyond just forgetting to cancel it.

>Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions

Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.

>like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed,

Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.

> I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass

Well, I sympathize, and I've sometimes paid for subscriptions I didn't end up using too, but such is life. We don't always make the most out of what we pay for. That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.

> Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.

Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5% of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers, I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.

I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the service requires raising the price, but that's largely a distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who didn't actually want to.

> Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.

That's just information asymmetry, which is again a market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at below-market rates propped up by people who don't actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you must come to a physical location during extremely inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid their service (for good reason).

> That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.

The ratio is much closer than you're letting on. Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially not how it's preferable to prop these services up with subscribers that don't want to use it.

It also just generally encourages a cancerous business strategy of making things that consumers don't really want, and the business knows they don't want, but being able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could be going to innovative products that people actually do want if they weren't being soaked up by useless subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue, making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think I would use.

By that argument the most customer-friendly action would be to force everyone in the world to subscribe to Netflix.

I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.

How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.

> How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement

Mind-boggling to me that you'd even have to do that. I get instant notifications for all purchases, we're in 2025.

Once they stole my number and 10 minutes later I had already contested the charge, blocked the card and requested a new one.

I feel like the vast, vast majority of businesses that are conducting monetary transactions with their customers are storing, at least, their last login time.

As a counterpoint, I found that Google had deleted all my servers from the GCP trial. I thought it's like AWS where it automatically starts billing you at the end. In fact was pretty sure I was paying for them (Google is definitely sending me strange unmarked invoices for something) but it turns out you have to activate it manually, and when I didn't, they just nuked the whole thing.

Neither default makes sense for everyone in this case.. better enforcing explicit preference choices

If something is to be considered insane, it is to demand a law for this. Mind your business – used to be written on the currency. If I buy a chicken and leave it in the fridge without eating it, should I also demand my money back from the supermarket?

> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it.

Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.

See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.

Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi doesn’t bill you if you don’t use the product that month. Do you understand those are not the same?

Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too.

I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.

Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.

We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly)

Kagi in the other hand is useful.

Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )

lol we’ve gone full circle to essentially piecemeal rent a movie model.

Kagi does keep a running subscription, so you are only getting until the end of that subscription month. But, in context and reality, it is pretty good.

I do this for all services now, it requires more active management on my part, but the mindful spending is worth it - both for the wallet and as a market signal. I used it most recently for Claude which has had scaling issues, diminished quality, defaults to concise responses.

Yeah I do this for some services, subscribe and cancel immediately so I don't forget. It works quite well.

I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.

A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.

According to the study, this affected about 30% of users. So, could offering something like fair pricing reduce this barrier and increase new subscriptions by 30%? https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/sophisticated-consu...

That's really interesting as a concept. As one random person on the internet (not a sample) I definitely avoid services that look like they'll be a pain to unsubscribe from, and will be much more likely to try out a free trial of something if it looks like an easy one to cancel. Super interesting that some people are trying to factor in that things into wider-scale enomics.

Same here, hence why I remembered it (even if it is from 2022), it did resonate so much with my own experience.

Yeah such are race to the bottoms. Because some assholes did turn cancelation into a Kafkaesque nightmare, now people don't want to subscribe in the first place. Who could have seen that coming? Genius MBA logic. And now honest businesses are in the shitter for it.

Seeing how much revenue subscription services make from inactive customers (and how much I have paid over my lifetime to services I no longer used) people don't overestimate this at all. If anything, users still underestimate it.

The disconnect between the researchers and people's actual estimations is that "cancelling a service" is much harder than the couple button clicks it usually takes. You have a structural problem: If you don't use a service, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's easy to cancel something if you make a conscious decision to stop using something. But if it just gradually falls out of use, your only reminder that you should cancel it are your bank statements or the occasional payment reminder email (that some services avoid sending for exactly this reason).

Basically that is what this study went into great length to measure, at least the way I understand it.

As someone who often doesn't subscribe because I don't want to get NYTed into having to pick up the phone to cancel, no this approach to pricing wouldn't change things for me.

What does work for me is when the service's docs have a very clear page on how to cancel the service without having to talk to someone.

Kudos for adopting a user friendly billing policy.

I would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits automatic renewal billing if the service hasn’t been used for some time.

how would that be enforced?

Fines

European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:

- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)

- Proactively investigate and check

- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results

I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.

Also helps to scare with huge fines set up for the likes of Google and Facebook which any normal company can‘t pay in their wildest dreams.

Yes, however fines don’t mean anything without enforcement. An interesting example is, on the subject about DEI at the FAA on the front page today, where the FAA was messing around with FOIA responses because they knew an individual couldn’t afford to sue over every single one. However a good regulatory body with teeth absolutely could do this.

Common sense should tell you that the amount a company like Google or Meta are fined is a lot higher than a "normal company"

It's built in. EU laws usually have a fining mechanism that says X % of {global/EU/regional} sales or a fixed sum, whichever is higher.

For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:

> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher [...]

(An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its legal status or the way in which it is financed.)

EDIT: formatting

Yes, exactly. So those "huge fines" won't really scare a normal company since it would not apply to them

Can you explain what you mean? I get the sense of sarcasm, but I'm not sure. 4 % of annual turnover [1] or 20 Mio, whatever is higher, appears substantial to me. If Alphabet would have been fined once in 2024 it would have to pay 4 % of its annual turnover of the year 2023, 307 billion US$, which amounts to ca. 12.3 billion US$. Or do you think 4 % is not enough?

Recital 37 [2] of the GDPR gives a definition of what an undertaking means in the context of the GDPR.

[1] https://www.munich-business-school.de/en/l/business-studies-...

[2] https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-37/

not the one who asked the questions, but I actually think 4% are not enough.

If Google or Meta makes 10% of their earnings with that shit and they have to pay max 4% they still have a 6% margin over - not doing it.

IMHO there should be a 4% fine additionally to paying back all the illegally generated earnings. Also, more executives should go to jail for it - And that's the C-Level Executives, because it's them which are accountable.

Problem with those things: usually it still hits the little ones harder than the big players...

US law has the concept of "civil contempt" to address willful lawbreaking of this sort. At that point executives risk jail time.

I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.

This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.

That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.

...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.

> they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease

They problem is the cancellation process, not "they shouldn't charge me if I'm not using it".

Yes, but that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it (i.e. every month after the one wherein I attempted to cancel).

> that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it

No, the problem would be moot if the cancellation process was as easy as the sign up process. And I think the US finally got that law

Even if I'd simply "forgotten" to cancel, the prohibition on charging me for the months I didn't use it would've made this a non-issue. Hell, I'd probably still be a customer today, now that I've long ago moved back to a city with Anytime Fitness locations.

> Even if I'd simply "forgotten" to cancel,

But you didn't. You clearly stated that the burden of cancelling was too high: " The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet"

This is the root of the problem. Not the "prohibition to charge for services you've subscribed to but don't use".

You’re in Australia?

If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc

You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.

If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.

A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.

This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.

I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.

Yours truely, Mr Middle Age Curmudgeon

> You’re in Australia?

Negatory. USA.

The Anytime Fitness is everywhere

Like chlamydia.

Damn kolas

I mean: koalas

My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.

We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.

Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?

You're assuming there is no cost to the business when the service isn't actively being used. Thats not always the case.

Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?

Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.

Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.

That seems unlikely, since soon there will be no FTC policies at all.

Ok that’s it, I‘ll renew my account now. I‘ve been using it two years ago and was pretty happy, until a problem in my payment processor failed the payments to Kagi. I thought I wouldn’t miss it, but lately I haven’t been happy with DDG and been reaching more for Google, or should I say suffering Google?

I also thought for a while that things like ChatGPT internet search or perplexity would replace DDG and Kagi, but, so far, I just want slop free sources to back up the slop I generated purposely in R1.

Exactly! For a lot of work, I use Claude as my first source, then typically I verify what I got out of it with a search engine. If the search engine also starts to hallucinate (starting to see that on Google if I'm not crazy), I have zero use for it. I want results that match my search query, period.

Kagi also has solid AI features.

Their Quick Answer feature does an AI summary of your query results. By default it shows up automatically when it has high confidence. You can disable this in settings or force it to show up by adding "?" to your query.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/quick-answer.html

If you want to jump into an AI chat session, you can add bangs to your queries. "!expert" launches a top of the line research agent and "!code" is good and software development. Both of these use the underlying search engine to get current facts.

Kagi even maintains their own LLM benchmark to monitor how well different models perform. They occasionally swap out default models to keep performance SOTA. You can specify a specific model if you want.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html

OK you got me, gptel supports it, so I signed up :P Search result quality is awesome so far, gonna play around with their LLM stuff.

This is a nice way to convince people to dip into the Kagi ecosystem. I use Kagi full-time, by default in all my browsers and love it! So this won’t save me a dime (which is still totally cool). It would be nice if they implemented it (or some metered pricing) for the extra-cost AI/LLM features, though (since I pay for them but rarely, if ever, use them).

I also really like this model for subscription services in general. It would be nice to, say, not be billed by Netflix (though really, I’m looking at Paramount+ or Peacock) for months when you don’t use the service. It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t be hard for companies to implement, and could potentially be regulated into existence everywhere by bodies like the EU or the CA state government.

Its good and they deserve credit for it. Let me be clear on that.

Now, wouldnt it be even better to implement usage based pricing with a maximum that's equal to the current subscription?

I dont know the Kagi details. Say you pay 10/month and each search is $0.02. You pay max(search_count * 0.02, 10).

I guess the logic is much simpler for their current system. It's 10/month, period. Then if you didnt search anything you get a refund. Instead of tracking and calculating usage.

However, usage pricing should be more enticing for casual users. With the statement refund for 0 use, there is now an incentive for infrequent users to NOT to use the product.

I think metered pricing makes sense for a service that's $10/mo (which the base Kagi w/ AI features is).

However, Kagi search unlimited is $5/mo. And, especially because of the whole "payment providers taking their cut" thing, I'd argue for services that are $5/mo or under, metered pricing doesn't really make sense.

Finally, I'd argue that this approach has other advantages over metering, even for higher-cost services:

* It's easier for devs to implement. Just one search needs to be recorded a month for an audit trail, rather than all search history.

* Keeping a search history for users is not needed at all, really (or, again, at most, one search per month). It's much better for user privacy.

* Most countries/states would have much more luck passing legislation forcing companies to implement this than metering, as well as enforcing it.

Another win for Kagi. Companies like Kagi, Valve win by just being nice. Can't stop winning.

That's great, but I can't even imagine "forgetting" to use Kagi. Completely indispensable.

It's also hard to forget once you've set it as your default browser. So I imagine that it'll mostly benefit people on the limited (300 search/month) tier, where you might want to ration your searches

Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable? Just subscribed, and looking around.

> Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable?

The academic lens is like Google Scholar, but better. The papers it surfaces are simply higher quality.

Otherwise, append your query with a question mark. The baby AI will do what Google's tries to do, except with a little more skill and better citations.

Most broadly, however, search. It's kind of wild but I forgot that searching the internet used to be fun. Kagi made it fun again.

For me, it is not even any particular feature, but just doing a search and getting straight and instantly the results that I need, without crap.

Also I guess part of this is probably the option I used to give higher priority to some websites like python org.

When I subscribed with Kagi, I was so totally pissed off and stressed by using Google where you will now have crap and unrelated ad links everywhere on the page. And in addition often first link that are garbage Copycat of principal websites. For example, for python, when looking for a module documentation, the official doc is the best but there would be hundreds of ad filled shitty pages that would appear first.

Not having to think when I search is the selling point.

In no particular order: Pinning results. Blocking Pinterest, the top few results aren’t spam. They are interesting.

Remember how 10 years ago you would Google something and it would just give you the result you needed in the first 3 results? Yeah, kagi does that.

Up-ranking, down-ranking, and straight up blocking sites is a big one for me. No more scrolling past w3schools or geeksforgeeks for this guy!

Also, it's built in that sites with a ton of ads are down-ranked.

I don't use Kagi anymore but the main thing I miss is the absence of "Popular products" which is completely useless and comes up far too often when using Google to find retail products and black listing websites from the search results. Outside of that, the results were largely similar.

Quality search results while not making myself a google user. De-googling is quite important to me. Besides that, basically what everyone else said; it upranks or downranks domains based on my settings, the claude AI answers are pretty good, and the no bullshit interface.

No ads, no forced "AI summary", doesn't sell my data to anyone. There are many other quality of life features, I don't consider any of them personally indispensable except for the ability to permanently remove a site from results, which I have used a few times.

I haven't used Google in many years so I can't directly compare the search quality, but Kagi is good enough that I've never had any reason to try something else since I've started using it.

Edit: I also use the !w Wikipedia bang constantly, I forgot that was a Kagi feature and not my browser. Obviously Kagi is not the only search engine with this feature though.

Let's be real, this lets them have a free PR win without having to actually give up anything at all.

It's funny, I don't even look at the Kagi logo anymore. I just see search results and occasionally notice that I"m using Kagi because I see the token in the request url.

The one area that'd make kagi thousands of dollars from me and the apps I use would be to lower their APO searches to a sane price.

Currently they charge 2.5c for an API search. This is between 1,000 to 1,000,000 times more than other companies in the space charge.

AI systems need to do dozens of searches for every question to get good results and kagi's results are really good. But not 1,000,000 times better than the competition.

I love kagi, but indeed I am a bit concerned of long term usefulness/sustainability of their model if they do not manage to reduce their search costs.

We are rapidly approaching the point where using an embedding model to run over the whole internet will be the best way to rank search results.

At that point all the special sauce Google et al have spend decades mastering will be worth as much as expertise in analogue computers is today.

maybe don't search with an llm

Hi, the API is still work in progress. Expect many more features and lower price once we officialy launch it (next few months)

Kagi is awesome, but the thought of having a limit led me to use it less and less and I eventually unsubscribed.

The 10$ plan doesn't have a limit anymore!

This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for especially crazy hours or something).

yeah that's interesting. $5 for 35/day could be better as well

I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result.

So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.

But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.

> Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.

The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.

they can try a shadow profile but at least it's not tied to me;)

> Their entire business model is to know who you are.

this is literally the opposite of reality

I will sign back up for a paid service when funding Russian search engine Yandex is dropped. Many like to forget there is a war.

Sources?

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

Calling the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of hundreds of thousands people, targeting kindergartens, hospitals, normal civilians, destabilizing an entire continent --> "politics".

"any search source we consider using goes through rigorous evaluation process that considers: result quality, API availability, economic viability, result latency, legal terms, privacy terms, and technical feasibility. the moment 'politics' is a part of factors being considered for search results, is the moment I stop working on a search engine."

What else would you call it?

War, invasion, terrorism,... take your pick.

Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi and google primarily operate, has never done anything repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.

Yes, you're completely correct. Kagi seems to have a very good product, it would become better if it would become a "good" company. I do everything to not use any big-tech software and services. In search it seems the options are limited.

Aye, the search situation is rather dire. I also try to distance myself from big-tech as much as possible, but it is rather difficult if you still wanna live a digital life. I don't feel like going full Richard Stallman, having to entirely avoid web browsers.

Just gotta cut your losses at certain points and accept less-than-perfect-but-still-better solutions.

Classic whataboustism. If you don't want to use something because of the US's geo-political actions, go for it.

>If you don't want to use something because of the US's geo-political actions, go for it.

Thanks for giving me permission, much appreciated. I needed that.

Responding "classic whataboutism" isn't very productive, just kills the conversation and makes it impossible to point out potential hypocrisy. Classic reddit comment.

"War is politics with bloodshed. Politics is war without bloodshed."

-- Clausewitz (I think?)

Comes from Mao, not surprisingly.

That's definitely an interesting hill to die on. I can say as a paid Kagi user and regular donator to ВСУ

I'm not dying on any hill. I will sign back up for a €20 euro a month niche search engine when either the war ends or Kagi remove Yandex from their funding list.

It's ЗСУ (Збройні Сили України) in Ukrainian

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B9...

Exactly. I've used the free tier a bit. I'd say it's never worse than Google, and sometimes significantly better. I'll happily pay a bit for this. But no way am I paying a single cent for anything where a significant part of what makes it work is Russian.

Glory and liberty for Ukraine!

We all have our red lines to draw. I personally use Kagi because it doesn't censor results from politically contentious sources like Yandex. Quite the opposite.

The problem, for me, is not censoring/not censoring sources like Yandex. The problem is them sharing profit with Yandex.

Ah I was just looking into trying a subscription. Can't see how supporting genocide financially is impartiality.

Do you use any American tech companies? There’s another war, FYI

Probably won't affect me much, since I've happily been a daily user since learning about them at Handmade Seattle last year, but I'm glad they're going this route nonetheless.

Always happy to hear people finding us through HMS! It's a fantastic community, and the Handmade ethos resonates deeply with a lot of us on the team.

Thank you for your support.

- Zac

Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out

* I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer and definitely not versed in US/California law, and given all the obviously exaggerated claims in this domain by all kind of actors, I can't give it much credit. I guess Kagi has to pay for the whole industry's decades of malpractices in this regard and that sucks, but I guess you could do better if you opened more about your

* I don't trust the product's ability to stay around. Startups come and go, and I'm not subscribing to a paid service and switching workflow without a reasonably solid belief that I won't have to do it again in a near future. Your new pricing policy actually helps quit a bit in this regard, the other bit requires you to actually stand the test of time, so just keep on doing your best I guess.

* Pricing has is shown excluding taxes. I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out, and I'm not paying if I don't know how much. In Europe, VAT is around 20%, so it's a pretty significant figure, that would be 60 bucks a year for the Ultimate plan. I don't have the slightest idea if that's the order of magnitude expected in California. Have your lawyer or accountant figure it out, because I sure as hell am not. Allowing me to pay in euros would also be a quite large hurdle removed, for similar reasons: exchange rates fluctuate, banking operation costs fluctuate, and even if I can work it out more easily than US taxes, I'm not going to do because this should be your job, and whatever figure I work out will be obsolete by the next time I'm billed.

What search engine do you use?

Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world shows that progress can be made. From afar, it looks like an interesting and good product, but I'm just not going to bite the bullet just yet.

> Mostly DDG

Why do you trust what DDG says but not Kagi?

> require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world

https://kagi.com/pricing

There is a free tier (no card required) and the billing is done per search. It’s that simple.

User-centered (Kagi) : they listen and take action on every user feedback[0], the results provided are based on user-defined rules and aims to be the ones that will convince users to keep their subscription going

Not user-centered (Google) : they don't give a dam about user feedback, the results provided are based on how much money they can bring to the company through ads/affiliations

[0]: https://kagifeedback.org/

The privacy one is hard for companies to prove but in my mind the fact that it is user funded not ad funded suggest an alignment of interests is at least theoretically possible. Which can’t really be said for google and friends

> I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out

You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.

As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.

To be fair, privacy policies are worthless. They could have a squeaky clean privacy policy and still collect data on you illegally. I did request a copy of all my data under the relevant consumer law for where I live, and it looked like they weren't collecting anything they shouldn't^. That's still not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.

^ They did still have a copy of all my old assistant threads, including deleted ones, but a mate who works there says that was just a bug with the system and should have been fixed. This was about a year ago.

I can provide one data point on privacy, that confirmed that Kagi was worth it to me.

I have been using Kagi since mad way through my wife's pregnancy, and my son is now not far from a year old. Notoriously, the moment the internet gets any sniff about impending or recent parenthood, every advert becomes about nappies etc.. But I haven't had this problem at all. I've done hundreds of searches on everything from toys, nappy brands, to newborn medical stuff, and my adverts stayed firmly child-free.

It wasn't until my son was about 6 months old that I saw any adverts at all, and I'm pretty sure that can be traced back to a FB post (I don't post often).

> I don't trust the product's ability to stay around

Why does it matter for a search engine? It's not a tool in which you store your data and need to be stable.

You use it now, when it's available. If one day it stops being available, or stops being good, then you stop using it. Nothing lost compared to not having used it in the first place.

> I don't trust the product's ability to stay around.

I also generally have this mindset, but I've come to think of it through the lens of me getting a better experience for a while and going back down to what I had before vs having never had that better experience.

Before I paid for Kagi I worried "what if it's great and then they go under?" But then I'd just go back to Google and move on, having never had that better search experience. I guess it's kind of like "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" Except that quote seems a bit over dramatic for a search engine...

It seems "fair" but, if they even make a single search in that month, you charge them the full monthly fee.

Real "fair" pricing just charges per request, and has the per-request pricing progressively go down as they reach various thresholds. Preferably with a free tier.

Kindle has been doing this for years and has really made me a loyal customer to them. Always surprised the penny pinchers at Amazon haven't killed it yet.

You mean kindle unlimited? That's the only monthly subscription they have?

I will never support the Russian invaders. I will happily subscribe to your service if you drop Yandex. Until then, hell no.

Dod Yandex invade someone?

For the frugal-minded customers, will this be motivation to avoid using the service for the first time that month (and a little sinking feeling when you do)?

My first thought. I'd think that first N searches being free each month would fix that for me. Paying for the full month for 1 search feels off, but paying the same for 10 searches dilutes the feeling by factor of 10.

But then it becomes a question of where exactly draw the line? And if you're going to do that, why not just charge per search so that you're not wasting money on searches you aren't using? Now you just have metered billing.

We've seen how that plays out with cloud computing: a few people wayyyy overpay and subsidise a lot of people on the free/cheap tiers

10 free searches a month would work well for me, I think. A small free tier might be enough to get me to pay for Kagi. Currently I'm just not sure I'm missing anything and I don't have a way to test that, last I checked.

I am hyper aggressive about cutting monthly services. If I don’t feel I am getting value, or can get the value from somewhere else with a little more work, I cut it. For example I would never, ever pay for YouTube Premium. This has led to a pretty disciplined set of monthly services and low cost. Kagi though is one of the most useful services I have and goes way above and beyond this bar, so keep it around.

To ape someone else’s lament: I can’t take advantage of this because I use it daily.

I use YouTube every day of my life and gladly pay premium. It costs money to host and serve the insane amount of video YouTube provides. To each his own

Same, it’s my most used streaming service and it also feels good to support creators a little bit while also not having ads on my TV / app where ad blocking is harder.

Tangentially related:

Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite.

So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else".

So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "every input".

Guessing that Kagi had excluded a few results so I tried in Google (Googles usual problem is adding things I never asked for and I wondered if Kagi had become overzealous or something).

So here are the results from Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+so...

For me Google says:

  > No results found for "Every input is best at something ".
  > Results for Every input is best at something (without quotes):

Meanwhile Kagi gives me a few relevant results:

https://kagi.com/search?q=%22Every+input+is+best+at+somethin...

So now, while Kagi has always been a lot better at not including unwanted results, it now seems it also has a larger effective index than Google.

I get 2 results from that Kagi link and they're both what I'd consider to be spam.

But they are there, and they are real, and they don't drown out any better results.

I'd rather have no results than spam results.

Totally agree, this is my main complaint against Google.

But IIRC all except one of the ones I got were actually relevant even if I had to tweak my query even more before I got better results.

I get three results. Top one is this thread on HN!

Three now, one of them this thread.

I'm not sure I'd agree the other two are spam. One of them is a plain-text transcript of some sharepoint files that mentions the quote and attributes them to the same person. The other is the same powerpoint, but in its original on some slide sharing website.

In many cases, either would be a great result. Here it still gives us the direct quote and confirms that all the way back in 2013 somebody attributed it to the same guy. That's a great lead if you try to track down the origin of a quote. If you cared enough you could now contact the person who made the slides to track the quote further.

As I understand it, they aggregate and re-rank results from Google, Bing, Yandex, Brave, (more?), plus their own index.

I don‘t understand why this is bad. Aggregation is a feature because it allows to be no worse than Google, in my experience likely better, and you pay for search with money and not with data.

I'd pay more for more search results (as opposed to searches, which are already unlimited with Kagi subscriptions). I found google unbearable when it removed the '100 results' default setting (until I found a chrome extension). But I stopped using Kagi for the same reason. Sometimes seeing lots of search results has its advantages, for example when gauging how common/popular a term is, or just being able to quickly survey many sites, or seeing where one of your sites/article appears in the search rankings.

Kagi attempts to only provide results it thinks will be relevant. While I liked the accurate results, I was frustrated when none of the 5-10 results was what I was after; at that point the UX is to type a new search term rather than simply scrolling further (I prefer the latter).

One other small downside is I slightly missed google's 'WebAnswers' (certain google searches will display images and summary info for the search term, rather than strictly results). WebAnswers were handy on super quick searches for, say, a particular car or aircraft model). I didn't think I'd miss this, but I did, although it was very minor.

The thing I appreciate most about Kagi is their "Quick Answer" option. Suffixing a question mark on a query to give me a high quality, cited RAG (?) AI summary has been such a nice option for quick answers.

No good. Not fair.

I put money into the account, you bill me per search - pre-paid usage based billing is the only way this can ever be "fair".

Kagi used to have limits on all plans, and I feel like associating cost to typos is a bad experience that you'd never have on ads-supported engines. Even now on starter plan (300/month) a mistyped query would cost you $0.0166 each.

Now I use the unlimited plan and so I search first, spellcheck later. Or sometimes it corrects it for me.

The time it took you to submit this comment was surely worth an awful lot of those $0.0166...

> you bill me per search

This only works at the extremes of volume. If you're targetting very-low use users, or enterprise, you can price per search. In between the frictions just don't make sense for any sensible target market.

Their search API is in beta right now.You can apply for access or wait for it to be released. I guess then making a front end to call it is simple eg an llm could make it.

A sliding scale would make sense. Don't use it? Don't pay anything. Fewer than x searches? Pay Y per search. More than z searches? Pay z * y for unlimited use.

I suspect this would also work great for streaming services, like HBO or Netflix. Rather than paying for unlimited use on 6 platforms OR spend fortunes on pay-per-view on yet another platform, just reward your most loyal customers but keep the door open for incidental users.

Well I guess it's finally time to try Kagi then.

I love this - the world needs more of it.

Last time I checked in on this, Kagi was bootstrapped. The single biggest motivation for me to make a bootstrapped business, is to make an ethicals busines.

This includes ethical pricing, ethical communication, and ethical UX.

They took a little investor money, then spent a big chunk of it on t-shirts lol: https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited pricing.

For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium e-mail and a premium task manager.

What makes web search so expensive?

How do you stream millions of songs per month when there is 43,200 minutes in a month?

If what you mean is you can pick from their library of millions of songs, Kagi sounds like an even better deal. For $10 a month you can search 400 billion web pages.

for $0 a month you can search 400 billion web pages on any other search engine with an adblocker. if Spotify's business model was "we're going to charge you $120 a year to show you otherwise free and ad-free content more efficiently", they'd be face down in the pool, and rightly so.

I would love to pay for kagi, but the $5 tier would give me search anxiety and $10 is cheeky as fuck. I appreciate that charging per search is a less stable business model than monthly tiers, but it would have made me a customer a long time ago.

It's not that Kagi is expensive at all. It is that your streaming services and premium e-mail service are incredibly cheap. Can you name a few things which you can purchase in your local supermarket that brings you the same value for $10?

the value of a paid online service is not "how useful is it in a vacuum?", it's "how much more effective is it than a free competitor?"

kagi's value is "how much more effective is it than using google with an adblocker?"

getting the value of the only search engine in the world at the supermarket for $10 would be a challenge. getting the value of "improved search results" is absolutely trivial. you could keep yourself alive for many days with $10. for $0 you can use google with an adblocker.

How are you going to do that math? I'd say it's at least twice or three times as effective as any free option. So at $10 it's an absolute bargain. But hackers will say that $10 is an infinite multiplier of zero, so you should always be "rational" and use the free service.

I'm not at the stage in my life where I don't have to count pennies for my food budget, and neither do most people. You're also comparing supermarket food with a vacuum of a person who is about to starve to death. I mean in real life, assuming you're not suffering from atrophy, what can you buy in the super market that brings the same value? This is of course assuming that you have an interest in better search quality – which not everybody has.

You could also argue that a wooden log is worth more than $10, because you can keep yourself from freezing to death by burning it. Then the value is infinite.

It’s great to see more companies adopting fair pricing models.

The first time I encountered this was with Slack—they only charge for active users.

We follow a similar approach with our products : 1) PodcastAPI.com - If no API requests are made within a month, the user pays $0. 2) website Premium Membership- rather than forcing users to pay a monthly fee, we allow them to buy a 2-day pass with one time payment (default option) - listennotes.com/premium

Caveat: customers will demand more. soon, they’ll request for hourly fair pricing - don’t charge me for those hours that i don’t use your service!

Is Kagi getting better for places outside the USA? Last time I tried to use them (in Ireland) all of the results were US focused, while Google would realise that I'm in Ireland and prioritise Irish businesses/sources and so on. I needed to include the word "Ireland" in any search phrase like "curtain cleaners Dublin" or otherwise I'd get curtain cleaning companies in a Dublin somewhere else, with no Irish results until the 2nd page.

Also, there was significant latency in searching compared to Google.

You have to switch the country yourself. It does not get more local than country. Local searches are a weakness in Kagi, yes.

I use it in England and I've had no problem with this at all.

Out of curiosity I just tried the same search, and all the results I get are for .ie domains, so it looks to be working correctly.

Yes, and there's a dropdown so you can easily pick a country other than the one you're in.

This is cool.

It’d be great if they extended it to refund $5 for anyone on a Pro or Ultimate plan doing less than 300 searches in a month, too. (I pay for ultimate and would still be very happy with that gesture.)

Would love to see Kagi and Mozilla to collaborate.

Could be problematic since Kagi keeps paying Yandex/Russia and there's sanctions you know...

I weekly monitor for news that they somehow allow using Kagi without Yandex. Still hurts after nearly 2 years of Kagi using to drop them. Without using Yandex at least I could convince myself that my money at least directly won't flow to Russia. I could revisit the idea of using Kagi again.

Thanks for pointing it out, people mostly don't speak about it anymore.

Yandex is a godsend to get information behind the silicon curtain.

Google too.

Unless you mean specificslly Russian sites in Russian. But those are not going to be available for long since Runet is slowly separating and VPN is now as illegal as in China

No, even content hosted on YouTube. Some videos are almost impossible to search for even if they are linkable via YouTube. For instance, it's almost impossible to find the video of MSNBC hosts saying they will vote for Trump if Sanders becomes the Dem candidate. First result in Yandex. Both are vehicles for state propaganda obviously.

I have too much respect for Kagi to want to see them overshadowed by Mozilla in any kind of partnership. In particular, I am a very recent but very happy convert to the Orion web browser which uses WebKit (not Blink, not Chromium, certainly not Electron, but WebKit) but supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions even in the iPhone and iPad apps, and has zero telemetry baked in and doesn't try to upsell you on a read-it-later service that was a questionable purchase by Mozilla even at the time it was made.

Kagi also actually has a business model. Mozilla has a teat that a US Court might order removed from their mouths soon as a possible remedy to sanction their Mommy in an antitrust suit; and looking at their 990, things are not looking particularly good for them if that happens.

An interesting problem with Kagi's basic model is that it ties up search history with an account in the financial system which adds failures not present when using something like Google or DuckDuckGo. But, since they accept Bitcoin, it is actually possible to wash the payment through a privacycoin and disassociate everything again. So there is a use case for crypto here that isn't obvious at first glance.

> Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.

https://kagi.com/privacy

Google: Don't be Evil. Although I'm having some trouble finding a reference on their website to back that up.

If you're going to start trusting search engine companies then maybe don't have them linked to your bank account. They can put what they like in a policy document but the problem is what happens when they decide to start doing things differently.

Real privacy oriented solutions REMOVE their ABILITY to keep your data. This is the reason I will probably never use Kagi. I am not logging into a search engine. Period. (I know this is futile,but it's the principle of the thing. And I don't want this to be more commonplace than it already is.)

You might find Privacy Pass of interest then - https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

It should be out in the next day or so.

Ooh this is interesting. Theoretically these could still be associated with my account right? Since you need to use my session token to generate these privacy tokens. Is there a technical explainer somewhere with instructions for setting this up without a web extension?

Edit: Looking into it, it seems like this uses the same mechanism for tokens as Cloudflare's turnstile system: https://privacypass.github.io/ or for the proper standard https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html

Excerpt that explains how it works:

> When an internet challenge is solved correctly by a user, Privacy Pass will generate a number of random nonces that will be used as tokens. These tokens will be cryptographically blinded and then sent to the challenge provider. If the solution is valid, the provider will sign the blinded tokens and return them to the client. Privacy Pass will unblind the tokens and store them for future use.

So it seems like as long as the cryptography is done right and Kagi's webextension does what it says, they are actually private.

This is very exciting new stuff. I am sure it'll find a million other uses.

Awesome. I didn't see much detail about how it works in the page. Something like this would be useful for other sites as well. Is this using an existing technology?

(Firefox extension is not found. It's probably not in the store yet. Can't find with search either.)

Looks like they're implementing this, which is also used by Cloudflare Turnstile: https://privacypass.github.io/

The standard has also been published as RFC9578: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html

We didn't launch this yet. It is in testing which is why we published this doc for testers. Full blog post with complete run down of the tech and implementation coming (very) soon.

Holy crap this is going to let me move some privacy-focused folks over to join me in Kagitopia. Good job guys, you are always working on something cool.

This actually makes me a lot more likely to sign up for Kagi! I've been hearing good things about it so I've been interested, but these days I'm very subscription-averse because there's just so dang many of them. But only paying for it if I actually use it makes signing up lower risk. (I know myself well enough to know that there's a good chance I forget to cancel otherwise.)

Balsamiq does something similar with their subscriptions: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/auto-hibernate-subscription...

I think it’s a good balance between locking the user into your product and dealing with the cost of a constantly evolving service.

This is a promising trial of an innovative pricing model. Many AI products require a $19.9 subscription fee just to try them out, yet I only use most of them a few times a month. For such occasional use, a monthly subscription doesn't seem very practical or user-friendly. I hope AI products eventually move to a usage-based charging model.

Sign up for an API account and connect something like Open WebUI[0] and you can have just that, with a few caveats (mostly around specific UI features).

Bonus is you can query multiple models at once, including local llama.cpp/Ollama models. I use it with the Claude and OpenAI APIs, as well as local Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek models.

[0] https://docs.openwebui.com/ (one liner if you have `uv` installed)

I like such moves by companies. It seems fair and stands out compared to most others who’d just take money even if the service is unused.

I’m not a Kagi subscriber though. The USD 150 and USD 216 a year prices for family duo and family are quite high for many geographies. Hopefully Kagi scales its customer base and is able to provide affordable plans.

The Ultimate tier comes with an AI assistant that has access to Claude 3.5, GPT 4o, DeepSeek R1, and so forth. It basically comes down to almost free for me.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing/5

Kind of related: Audible offers the same thing, by reporting credits if you don't use them in the current month. But there's a catch: you can only "Report" 6 credits, after that, your unused credits are lost.

A warning from someone who forgot to disable their subscription for 18 months before realizing what they lost.

Oh wow, thanks for this, had no idea there's a credit limit.

More annoying to me is that you have to use up your credits before cancelling your sub. If you have credits and you cancel your sub, you lose the credits.

Yeah, once I discovered that, I basically bought the first six audibooks in my wishlist with the credits I had left and cancelled the subscription

Is this happening a lot? I definitely don't have any months where I make zero web searches. I'm not even sure I have individual days where I make zero web searches. Are a lot of Kagi customers going on month-long trips into the rainforest or something?

Paying for good search sounds interesting to me. It's there such thing but without AI stuff?

You can disable Kagi’s AI answer feature in the settings. But, personally, I find it extremely effective. If I want an AI answer I put a ‘?’ at the end of my query, if I don’t use a ‘?’ then I get a regular search engine set of results. Really simple UX.

The AI answers all have references too.

I've never heard about Kagi but a paid search engine just sounds great? I assume the userbase will always be small enough that websites won't bother doing SEO for it. Maybe there's some low hanging fruit there in getting less spammy results?

Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?

I think you're talking about Choice-supportive bias.

I don't know why you're throwing this out here without anything to support it.

> Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi.

It is paid service, what is the other option? People that don't use the service being happy with it?

> because their brain wants to justify them paying for search

It is search engine, not candy crush. No one wants to pay for searching, if they do it is because they find it useful. It is not their brain gets a shot of dopamine every time they do a search on it.

I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four" describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced products, so they must love them in order not to feel like "idiots".

You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect making you think that the people on the other side of the fence are delusional.

Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on the other side.

The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...

It could also be that the aspect of personality that causes people to think Kagi is better also causes those people to buy it.

Would be great if every company was forced by law to do this. Pay only for what you use.

It's rare to find a subscription service doing something kind-hearted, sensible and good-faith towards their customers. There are so many dark-pattern subscription practices out there. Thank you - you've got a new signup :)

Let me be sceptical for a second. This is such a non-feature. A single search a month consitutes usage. You literally have to forget about Kagi for more than a month to have any advantage here. My guess it this happens less than in 0.1% of paying accounts. Wake me up when they announce unused searches rollover.

> Introducing Fair Pricing

This is _really_ weird marketing, in that it implies that previously the pricing was _unfair_. That's not an idea you generally want to put in your customers' heads.

What my mind went to, how could someone forget to use a search engine, especially one that is supposedly so much better than Google for a whole month?

I guess... Still a positive thing that they are trying to make their product/service more "fair", and are progressing in a good direction?

Yeah, I mean it's a positive move, I suppose (though, if this is a _common_ thing, then they have other problems, because clearly the people involved aren't using it as a search engine), but it's a strange way to market it.

This feels like an example of a company trying to do the "right thing" and deciding there must be a way to monetize that, regarding what everyone (even the web) is telling them.

Imagine the balance of revenue from non-returning users (think fitness) vs very heavy users, and finding a way to keep both parties happy. And the implications it has (those "paused" users still count towards "onboarded" users).

Major props Kagi team, or who-ever pushed this idea!

Subscribed! I have a severe subscription fatigue, so I was avoiding Kagi. But with this change, it makes it much less problematic.

That reminds me, I need to cancel my 24 Hour Fitness subscription.

When most of services nowadays seem like a hostile subscription, this brings joy.

edit: use of Yandex on the other hand.. yeah that's a no go for paid subscription.

Well, this tipped the scale, and I just subscribed. Honestly, so refreshing to have a normal search engine after 2 years of nonstop AI crap thrown at my face.

Uhm.. Kagi has plenty of AI features. :) To be fair, you can turn them off if you wish.

This is the best thing I have seen today. I read about this notification in the morning and had to re-read it to verify that I understood it correctly.

I stopped using Kagi because the results in my native language are terrible. It's a pitty because Google is the only search engine good at it.

That's why I never ended up using ddg. On the other hand I find that kagi is decent enough when I search in French, not as good as English but still better than google.

this. I tried so many times to run away from google but I have to come back every time because all search engines are extremely anglo-centric (or maybe rather US centric) and really don't care about other localizations.

German results are reasonable if I select Germany as a region

I would have purchased several services over the years if they had a pricing like this, which ultimately I did not (because they did not). In particular there was some video editing software for $20/mo, but I knew I'd probably go months between using it. I'd have gladly paid $20/mo when using it, but it would stick in my craw the months I didn't use it.

When the whole SaaS stuff started to pop up as buzzword I actually believed that it would work that way.

You don't pay some heavy license fees for a local installation anymore, but get a login where you get billed a specific amount if you use it that day/week/month etc. I was pretty sad when I saw how it got implemented...

You're right, but the software I mention above was some locally-installed software with a SaaS-like pricing.

Still no revision of the Yandex partenership. Spending money on Kagi is spending some on Yandex, owned by the Russian terrorist state.

They probably have enough data to indicate that a negligible number, if not none, of their customers are searching quite a lot. If they had a lot of customers who were using the service at a very low frequency, this policy actually disincentivises them from making that first search. For those people, the cost of their first search is suddenly 5 (or 10) dollars!

Good pricing approach that I think lots of companies should start adopting. But I just can't wrap my head around paying for my online searches. self hosting a free service like SearXNG will forever my go to option for privacy and security

Is there any concern that this results in a negative feedback loop of "oh, I better not use Kagi for this one random thing, it'll cost a whole month's subscription"?

Maybe a threshold of a dozen searches or so before the subscription fee kicks in.

They say billing cycle, but what if I'm on the annual plan? Is my cycle a year? Or does my renewal date get pushed back a month if I don't use it?

I use kagi hundreds of times a day, so it's not something likely to happen soon, but I'm still curious

Wow, awesome. If everybody did this I could stop charging my credit card number every 6 months.

tried Kagi for 2 months. It works really nice, but I think it is overpriced. I as a heavy user do notice the difference in milliseconds in comparison with google. Paying $10 and still having that delay felt really bad, so I ended up canceling my subscription.

Maybe introduce a security team instead of building a browser and email on top of your search

Care to elaborate? Comments like this are not helpful for people outside of whichever loop you are in, and people in the loop already know what you are alluding to.

They have 0 people knowing security stuff, but think they are capable of writing a browser or email service.

Pleasantly surprised. Nice job, Kagi! This is consumer-friendly and to be commended.

A good chunk of inflation is just price gouging, in today's modern world.

There are more tools to understand data and squeeze every penny from customers.

It's admirable when a company isn't trying to bleed customers dry.

I don't understand people who would use kagi (or any search engine) sparringly. If you're already willing to shell out money for a replacement, why wouldn't you use it all the time?

I trialed Kagi.

I liked it, the results were good, no ads, gave me access to Google without being tracked.

I would pay for that, except they block Tor, and I normally use Tor.

> gave me access to Google without being tracked

Hint: you can use Google in private mode. And unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.

> unless you block all trackers almost all sites will still use analytics so Google knows what you read.

That's like driving without light and seat belt. Should be very obvious to every HN reader, that a content (ad) blocker is the first thing you install

Heya, this is Zac from Kagi.

We do not block Tor - in fact, we recently launched our own self-hosted Tor node[1].

We have had problems with GCP blocking VPN and Tor traffic (mostly the former) when we have made zero configuration to do so. It's quite frustrating, and we have been working with their support to improve this generally.

Haven't heard anyone having issues with Tor since we set up the node though :) If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/accessing-via-tor...

I used to have issues with VPNs but it’s been a long time ago. Works flawlessly now.

Good - looks like Kagi will be on the menu.

Note that URL is 403, from Tor browser.

Works fine from non-Tor.

(I'm now experimenting with the Kagi hidden service.)

Hey! This url and any search I do are blocked with 403 if I access it either with Tor or my VPN. Anyway I love kagi and continue to use this, but this aspect is pretty annoying.

Every service provider should be obligated to do this. I'd bet there are tons of phone or Internet plans that have 0 usage

this is cool but .. is it really worth a big announcement? who is paying for kagi and not using it for an entire month?

It would be great if they consider power purchasing parity to make the service more accessible for developing countries.

My impression is that pricing of kagi is already close to cost price (plus salaries).

I think we are entering an era, where these things will just not be available to people in developing countries, as they cost more than they can pay. Especially taking Ai into consideration.

However, we could start paying fair prices for produce like clothes.

Why not charge x ct per search. Or rather, x ct per click through. Or rather, x ct per action on a target website?

Search = advertisements

Kagi used to charge based on the amount of searches you would do. It wasn't x ct per search, but x $ per Y searches.

A lot of people didn't really like that, so they introduced the $10/mo for unlimited. You can still pay $5/mon for 300 searches: https://kagi.com/pricing

I would probably be paying less if I just did cents per search, but I honestly just like unlimited plans, so personally wouldn't get pay per search.

I'm the type of person who does a Kagi search for "5+7" instead of pulling up a Calculator, so I would rack up pretty quickly.

I remember when they initially announced their plans here a while back and that actually held me back from pulling the trigger until I figured out that they updated their plans. $10/unlimited was an easy sell for me. I did consider maybe giving the $5/300 searches plan a try, but I actually wanted the inclusion of the FastGPT you can invoke by adding a "?" onto your query. Unlike Google and their inclusion of Gemini, it's nice that it's not there if I don't want it, but there if I do.

But on search and paying for search: I'm all for paying for search, but if I'm going to have a search engine set as my default, I don't want to feel penalized for my mistakes, and the most common mistake I make is simply not quite getting a URL entered in correctly and having my browser redirect me to a search page instead, and if I'm paying for Kagi in any capacity, then it's going to be Kagi.

A little Kagi nitpick (off-topic): I contributed a few translations when Kagi was in beta. Then, Kagi introduced a subscription which was too pricey for my budget, so I stopped using it. Nevertheless, Kagi has kept emailing me to contribute even more free translations.

Kagi team, folks say you have a great product, but if you don't pay attention to small issues like this one, you are bound to lose some of your goodwill.

We are definetely not emailing you, it could be the service we use to crowdsource translations (localazy). I suggest removing the account from there or check their settings? (as we do not have control over these emails)

This is a very disappointing reply.

Anyway, yes, they come from a service you are using with the subject line "[Kagi Search] There Are Some Untranslated Phrases." I know how to unsubscribe or reroute emails to my spam folder.

Awesome Kagi, always the awesome Kagi.

I use Kagi since 6 months, and it's the best experience i've ever had with a search engine.

Someone please convince me to use Kagi. What makes it superior to Google for you?

It’s nice that they are in a position that they can do this. I use Kagi every day.

Why not directly pay what you use? Similar to how LLM Apis are billed these days.

Because they don't want the users to feel stressful for using their product more.

> LLM Apis...

Yeah exactly, ChatGPT doesn't have this option for their web interface either, only for API. For the same reason.

What happens when you cancel subscription with a lot of unused credit ?

It just uses Stripe credit under the hood. So as long as you still have an account registered with us (active subscription or not), you can use that credit to resubscribe any time - or use it on other things, like API credits, or gift codes.

if the plans included the search API for personal use I would almost consider, but brave search+ai is good enough for me, also they blocked my vpn's another big nono

We would like to eventually offer everyone an API credit stipend with their subscription. Our APIs should get plenty of love this year, so please stay tuned.

> also they blocked my vpn's another big nono

Argh, I am sorry to hear that. We do not block _any_ VPN, but have been struggling with our hosting provider (GCP) to not do this. We are working with GCP support on this - if you give us a chance, and encounter any issues, please reach out to support@kagi.com with details and we will see what we can do.

Also, see my other comment in this thread about Tor, if that is helpful for you.

Can I get this on my Netflix, Disney+, whatever too pls?

Not anti Kagi, but..

Imagine Tom Cruise in a variation of Minority Report. As he enters the shopping mall, the onslaught of cognitive infiltration envelopes him. He's not there for recreation, nor to evade or investigate anything. He knows why he's there. Or, he did know, but now finds himself trying to remember as he fends off sleazy desires for strange things. He knows he doesn't need more ugg boots, the unworn pile in his closet and fact that he's never worn boots of any kind a testament to this. He knows a new car won't reignite the wonder of his youth or make the foggy shores of a moribund sea glisten with golden light. He couldn't afford it anyway. Despite a lobotomizing decade of overtime and side hustles, the red queen always stays ahead. It's those damn conversations with the pariah professor.

If I didn't waste my time with her, my social credit score would expand and I could afford the newest virtual vacation to the green place they say existed before Amazon bought the planet. That hag is oppressing me, damn her!

Tom was different though. Somewhere in the vestiges of his mind he knew this was bullshit. She was no hag; she was beautiful and fascinating and wise. It was her and only her that made him think again, to contemplate meaning, to ask forbidden questions, to feel.

"It's just the mall, stupid" he remembered. The enormous image of an inflamed scrotum foisted itself onto his entire being, gracefully rotating to show all angles. That's right... He was just slipping into the drugstore with the sole purpose of buying antifungal cream for the persistent case of ringworm he contracted from that robotic concubine store.

He was becoming disoriented and dizzy. Boundaries were beginning to dissolve and he knew it was time.

An androgynous figure in full lotus hovered before him, emitting a calming hum. In its halo could be faintly seen a scrolling index of the stock market. "Do you want sanctity of mind? Is it time for inner reflection? Do you need focus?". "Buy Now Pay Later!" it hissed.

In a whirling, scintillating carousel of nausea and mumbling faces he lifted his wrist, touching it to the NFC receiver on the hovering being's pulsating third eye.

And suddenly, as if waking from a nightmare, he was human again, with will and self definition.

Compelled to move quickly, he knew there was only 20 minutes, and his balls were screaming.

Looks like I am a kagi customer now.

What a bold and genius move.

A reminder that Kagi still uses Yandex under the hood so part of money is going to Russia.

No thank you.

Just raising my hand as another who would sign up, but for that whole Yandex thing.

Does it mean that if someone dies they won't need to cancel the service?

Will Kagi survive in a world where realtime pressures to conform to censorship and link promotion can destroy search experiences?

I mean this is great. But how are they resisting the global trend to be an advertising influenced portal? How are they not adapting?

I would say there are three major factors:

1. We have a diverse set of upstream sources. It would require all of them to be "compromised" for our results to completely tank.

2. We have a "crawler-lite" that solely collects info on page quality - number of ads/trackers detected, page speed, etc. - and we take that into account when ranking the results, generally nudging them down the page if "cleaner" ones can be found.

3. Our sole source of income is our users, and we actively respond to impacts in search quality that our users submit to us on our feedback form. If they are not happy with the results quality, then we are out of business.

Put simply: Our technology and business model is completely aligned to resist "enshittification". We have no reason to bias results or "sell out" to anyone.

With the momentum we've gathered, we are also taking first steps to building our own full scale index[1], both as a valuable contribution to the ecosystem of search and a contingency to reduce our reliance on 3rd parties.

[1]: Help us build it! https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html

Now I just wish there was a way to purchase Kagi credits.

I'd happily pay a one-time fee for a 1000-search package that would be added to my 100 free searches.

Took this opportunity to become a paying customer. Thank you Kagi. I pray that your sadly inevitable enshittification can be warded off.

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