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Comment by gxs | Hacker News Reader

Not every business sets out to be the next Google

Loyal Kagi customer here, based on their posts and in my dealings with them, they are doing their thing and doing well

They are focused on privacy, do a great job of it, and their AI assistant is top notch (highly recommend you take a look, can choose from many models and swap out responses instantly, not even getting into the awesome search features)

Not commenting on your (good) who is the main audience question, rather the other point about if Kagi is doing well

I subscribed my girlfriend to it as well and tell people whenever the moment is appropriate

Really rooting for these guys to succeed long term

As an aside, when I got my Kagi subscription the first thing I did was lower Pinterest results

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I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account. Duckduckgo is more known for privacy and searches well through tor.

Here are the stats: https://kagi.com/stats

How many are paid vs trial accounts?

We know family doesn't offer a trial nor teams.

126 teams x 5 or 6 members = 1,000 accounts at 10 per day 10k

4500 family plans: most will take the 20 a month plan 100k

45000 individuals lets say they are all paid most on the 5 dollar plans lets assume on average 6.50 is earned 300k

Then you have orion+ members at 2000 giving an extra $15 per account. 30k

They probably make 450k a month

They have 19 employees on linkedin and they are listed at under 50 everywhere else. Lets give them 25 employees at 100k average salary which would be 2.5 million in salaries which might be low.

Add on costs to actually run the website (paid search, servers, office costs) which hopefully cost less than 3.5 million.. the rest is profit.

I'd say they are doing well enough. My average of 5/6 per team might be much higher if they have a few 100+ sized teams. I think the mode would be 5/6 regardless of the average.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account.

Looking at their privacy policy they state the following:

> We may store web requests made by user browser temporarily, with strict retention periods, for debugging purposes, and in a manner that they are not linked to an account.

https://kagi.com/privacy#server-data

Is it actually true though? They've lied about other things, what stops them from lying about that?

For 2 years they've said "Kagi has zero marketing budget and spends zero on marketing", that's a lie and they still haven't changed it. They've sponsored over 200 youtube videos https://filmot.com/search/%22brought%20to%20you%20in%20assoc...

Do we know that they spend money on this or is that inferred?

I asked because the search you've linked to only seems to list relatively niche chess videos on one creator's account. And the videos themselves are also ad-supported. It's (at least) not impossible that the sponsorship association is not budgeted in the way that (I think) you infer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40013889

https://kagifeedback.org/d/3822-kagi-is-sponsoring-youtube-v...

"I watched Daniel King for 10 years and have previously donated to him, now I am happy that we are in position to sponsor his work which I believe is extraordinary.", this also definitely sounds like monetary compensation to me.

Thanks! I see why they may not consider this "marketing", even though it is obviously a sponsorship based on that information.

> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one.

I don’t use it, but the Privacy Pass [0] thing should actually make it great for privacy if you care more about that than personalization.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

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