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I don't know nor do I really care what other search companies are making. I pay $10/month for Kagi because it works for me and it's good. I don't even care about Kagi as a company (I don't care about any company); their search works. It's a good product, and I'm happy to keep paying for it as long as it keeps being useful while all the free competitors are still terrible. I use about 2k searches per month.

edit: Even just the ability to rank, pin, and block domains alone is crazy useful. I never need to see Pinterest in any image search results again. If I see a crappy blog spam site, I just block it and it never shows up again. It feels like these are basic, fundamental features that every search engine should have had a long time ago. It's pretty sad that Kagi is getting so much praise for doing things that really should have been standard for at least a decade (not sad in any negative way toward Kagi, but because our standards and expectations for search have dropped this low).

So funny that blocking Pinterest comes up in all discussions on Kagi (I've mentioned it myself in the past). I almost think people might pay $1 a month just to block Pinterest.

HackerNews discussion to remove Pinterest from Google search results (2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16613996

Honestly, this was a better ad for Kagi than what I got from the site. I'll actually check it out. Thanks

$10 felt a bit steep until I realized there is probably the economies of scale at play here.

1) There is a marginal payment overhead. I'd assume $0.50-0.75, leaving their amount down to $9-ish.

2) It's a fairly niche product with a still-small userbase. ~40k users at ~$9/mo = $360k/mo (I know there's $5/mo users and $25/mo users but I'd assume there are far more $5/mo and $10/mo users than $25/mo users)

3) They have to keep the service running 24/7/365, so you have to hire devs either across multiple time-zones or compensate them enough to be OK fighting fires at 2am.

As the user of a service things like payment overhead, a small userbase, and dev salaries aren't my problem. My only concern is what I'm getting for what I'm paying.

$5 a month for fewer than 10 searches a day is clearly not a good deal. $10 a month might be worth it for some, but an extra $15 a month on top of that for AI results is kind of crazy.

For me, it's also about voting with my wallet. I'm not enthusiastic about invasive ad tech. As it stands, nobody else offers what Kagi offers at any price. If there were an equivalent service for $5/month, I'd give it a look, but there isn't.

That extra $15 a month is for access to LLMs. They currently support the Claudes, the GPTs (not o1), Mistral, Gemini, Llamma, Qwen QWQ, Nova, and DeepSeek. It's currently unlimited access in the standard chat format.

You can also choose if you want the chat to RAG search results into the context for additional info, and then cite those sources. To me, replacing a Claude/ChatGPT subscription with $15 on top of a company I already like, while also getting a bunch of other models was a no-brainer.

That makes a lot more sense!

This. I used to host my private searxng service which is a bit like what Kagi is selling. Yes, Kagi offers site blocking, rewrites and pinning which is great. But the best part is the access to R1 combined with Kagi search which adds context.

You can just quickly write !ai to the toolbar and you have a deepseek chat open. Or !sum to summarize the current page or video.

You can also self-host that part. OpenWebUI integrates very well with searxng.

But kagi does a good job too, indeed.

The way I think about it is how much time do I save by having better search results. I'm on a family plan currently, but was on an unlimimited 10/month plan. At the rate I value my time, Kagi needs to save me well under an hour per month through better search results. I'm quite confident it reaches and exceeds that bar relative to google. And that's even before you get into any philosophical/moral preferences for being the direct customer rather than being the product (as in ad-supported services).

Perhaps the product isn't for you.

I don't know Kagi's financials, but this is usually the case for a lot of products with a smaller customer base. For example, a block of Kraft cheddar will be a lot cheaper than an equivalent-sized block from an organic local dairy. There's always a customer base that is willing to pay for a differentiating feature or value.

I'm satisfied paying for it because the product works well and saves me time. I can't say the same for a lot of the random $10 impulse buys I make in a month.

If you can pay $10/month for a better search experience, then Google's making way more than that much off your data.

Kagi saves me much more than $10 of time every month. I definitely don't regret the subscription cost. Their LLM thing (append "?" to your internet search query) is worth more than that on its own.

I’ve been paying for Kagi for a long time through all their pricing model changes and updates. I have never once hit the search limit. I know they base their tiers on market research of search volume balanced against cost of serving a query. If you’re looking for reasons not to pay for search, you’ll find them. But the pricing model is hardly one. If you want an amazing and respectful search experience, and want to back a company that’s truly doing right by users and innovating at the same time, give Kagi a try!

I support them ($10/mo) because they do a good job and I figured, if I pay, then the likelihood of them using sketchy ways of making money is reduced.

The reason why it's worth it is because its search works really well. I've tried DuckDuckGo, Bing and always subconsciously ended up back at Google. This is the only search service I've used that works better than Google search and I think it's a combination of them not putting ads on the search and the way they let you tweak the search to block poor quality sites. How much it costs them or how much google profits vs your payment is not really relevant to me. It's the best working search engine in my opinion.

Kagi Ultimate plan ($25/mo) includes Kagi Assistant with more than 15 different models (including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0, ChatGPT 4o + o3 mini, DeepSeek R1 etc). That plan suddenly becomes the cheapest, IMHO. I know that paid versions of LLM services offer more advanced models, but you at least get ahead of the rate limits this way.

I subscribe to an unlimited family plan. When considering how much cleaner my web experience is, it's a no-brainer. Default search engine on all our phones and devices.

They're my portal to the web. It's less like an optional web service (like a streaming service), and it feels more like I'm paying for them to be my ISP.

I pay $10/month just to have search results that aren't littered with SEO spam. The time savings alone make it totally worth it for me. Everything else is a giant bonus.

FWIW I signed up about 4 months ago on the starter plan and I'm definitely going to run over. I could be smarter about my searches though. I've switched to kagi on ALL of my devices, including work devices. And I could have searched to using google for most gifts/maps stuff instead.

some anecdotal data:

11/2024: 183 searches

12/2024: 360

1/2025: 376

2/2025: already at 222

Will definitely (happily) have to upgrade to the $10 plan. It's been great.

I subscribed to kagi's $5/m plan since last March, and my usage until now is around 3.3k searches, with the monthly distribution similar to yours. Some months it's more, some months it's fewer.

Currently I'm debating with myself if I should go for the $10 plan. I'm all down for supporting kagi, but surprisingly I didn't use as many searches as I thought.

One thing we noticed anecdotally (may not apply to your case) is that Kagi users search less when they switch to Kagi from other search engines, and the likely reason is that they just find things faster. Which is basically the main metric we are optimizing the product for - happy users, lower cost for us.

You can't expect world percentages to match US percentages. The US is only 5% of the world's population and has a very different relationship to search. Also, only 63% of the world is online, so what does "90% of global" even mean?

Back-of-the-envelope:

- 2tn searches per year.

- US is 20% of all searches.

- Us revenue is 76bn

$76bn / (2tn * 0.2) = $0.19 / search

So, getting 300 searches for less than $0.02 per search sounds like a pretty good deal.

I thought this too but at this point I've been subscribed well over a year. On a typical workday I might use 20+ searches, but I frequently use little to no searches on weekends and holidays, etc. Ultimately I end up using right around 300 per month (averaged out across the year), so I think their pricing isn't as wild as it initially looks.

It's just about the best Internet-related money I spend. I get fast, quality results on a service that doesn't obviously bend over backwards to monetize me. Ironic, in a way. I thought it was spendy at first, and now I can't imagine cancelling my subscription.

I assume Kagi's customers (of which I've been one since 5/22) are apt to value retaining their privacy more than Google values selling their data. That is to say, it's worth more than $10 (and more than $23 a month) for me to believe my data isn't being sold to advertisers. If you don't take that position, or set different values on it, I can certainly see why $5 or $10 a month wouldn't be worth it to you.

There's also the matter of Google search quality being increasingly bad, while Kagi's is consistently... okay. They also have a a lot of nice features, liking being able to change the weight of different sites in your list of results.

I don't have exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 80-90% of google ad revenue comes from the ad prices they can charge for US users. I would be shocked if the percentage was less than 50-60% of revenue from US alone, which would put the value extraction per user for google at ~10$/month/user

Sorry, I mean that the revenue seems to not just be search ad revenue but ad revenue. Google's ad revenue comes from a lot of places, such as in your Android app. I assume it also includes adsense and other things.

> This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient.

You can split your searches with search engine shortcuts on the desktop, and the search engine quickbar on mobile.

When I still was on the starter plan, I used Kagi whenever I had a search that if I use google, I know I will:

- get a bunch of listicles and AI slop (Kagi downranks and bundles these)

- get a buch of AI images (again, Kagi clearly labels and downranks these)

- have to do multiple google searches for, but can instead use Quick Answer for

- will get a bunch of Reddit pre-translated results for

- technical / scientific questions, because of the sites I can uprank/downrank/block

I used google for things like:

- highest building in the world

- $bandname Wikipedia / Discogs

- name of thing I can't remember but have the approximate word for

You get the idea.

Depends on how you use it. For non-developers, under 10 searches per day on average sounds right. Not everyone has a job where they sit on a computer all day.

For me, I use Kagi only at home for personal use. And most months, I don't exceed 300. Of course, if I included work related searches, then yes - 10 searches won't get me far.

I've been paying $5 a month for over a year and have hit the 300 search limit only once. I feel like I'm pretty active on the web, but perhaps I just have days where I don't search as often as others.

Wow! I wouldn't be surprised if I make more than 100 searches per day.