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Comment by C4stor | Hacker News Reader

The "fair use" part takes a lot of place in this article.

It talks a lot about what happens if you use more tokens than what you're allowed, but curiously doesn't pip a word about what happens if you use less - for example maybe with a partial rebate on your next billing cycle ?

I think "fair" should mean "fair for all parties involved", currently it's rather a "we don't want to incur any risk" policy, since I don't see how it's fair for my end of the contract. I'd rather pay for my actual usage at any other provider than pay for min(actual usage, 25$) at Kagi.

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It’s the exact opposite. They are incurring a huge amount of risk with this.

6 hours ago most users didn’t have access to this feature at all. Now we have $4-8 of raw token credits a month to use on a well-built feature.

I’m paying $9 a month with the annual subscription, and it was worth it just for Search. Now they’re giving me $17 worth of value for the same price.

Their margins must be razor thin, and they’re only able to offer this much value because they’re counting on most people not using all credits. If everyone did, or if they gave rebates, they’d go out of business.

Probably a lot of subscribers that will never use it, like myself.

For myself at least I agreed to the original price.

If more features are added and I don't use the but other people do, as long as the features I pay for stays, I'm happy.

The other point of view is that they are now forcing users to pay for both search and AI, even if they do not want to use or fund the development of the later. You used to be paying 9$ for search, now you are paying 9$ - x for search and an unknown amount for AI.

As an existing happy subscriber to Kagi, this statement is illogical.

I currently pay for x. Soon I’ll get x + y for the same money.

That’s better.

"As an existing happy subscriber" -- goodness! Even after years of seeing what happens after such illogical evangelism, hn never ceases to surprise you and brings the fandom out in full force. It's like with Apple. You say once "your phone switches on and off on its own - maybe something is amiss with the hw/sw" and there are dozens of replies already blaming you "you must be holding it wrong!". It's a whole new level of apologism.

I don't follow what either you or the OP are upset about. Where is the apologism and why do you think it's needed?

Kagi rolled out a free feature to its existing customers without increasing the price of their plans. The limits of that plan seem quite generous, as well. The only way I can make sense of the OP's post is that the OP wants the Kagi subscription price to decrease. Perhaps that's fair, but it doesn't make any sense here because you're strictly getting more for your money. If you're paying $10/month for a subscription, yesterday you couldn't use Assistant and today you can for the same $10/month. Placing a cap on how much you can use seems quite reasonable given the service costs money to operate. If you choose not use it, you're no worse than you were yesterday... you can happily go about using the search service you were already paying for.

Is the problem that the free usage isn't unlimited? Is it that not using the free service doesn't reduce the search price? Or is it that those using Assistant more than you appear to be getting more value for their money? I'm not trying to be dense, but I really don't see what's even remotely controversial about this announcement.

Lately, every subscription I have is increasing the fee without giving me anything. Kagi is giving me something extra without charging me any more money. I'm sure the nefarious intention is to make their service more attractive to non-subscribers and grow their userbase, but interests can align.

I am also an existing happy subscriber to Kagi. I currently pay for unlimited X. Now I pay for limited X, where I can't even see if I'm approaching limits or not. Anyway, my main point is that I'm getting LESS for the same money.

Search isn't getting limited is it?

And the GPT features always had some limits.

I'm not paying for search, I'm paying for Unlimited Assistant. No, they did not "have some limits". Or at least, the product they sold me was very clearly labelled "Unlimited". The word "Unlimited" is literally in the name, and it was described as such in more wordly descriptions.

Maybe your usage might not be affected, I propose to check for a month and if it really goes over the limit, you have the option of canceling the subscription.

It definitely is worded in a way that it can either be interpreted as (unlimited searches and unlimited premium ai) or (unlimited searches and premium ai).

It also may not help that they did not enforce the fair use policy until now. At least that is what I read out of their blog post.

But the fair use policy has been included a long time. I checked 2023-12-25 and found it there, might be available earlier, but no interest in looking harder.

They advertise with the phrase "Unlimited Kagi Assistant", so I'm not sure how you can interpret that as "unlimited searches and premium ai". Kagi Assistant refers to the same thing as "ai" here. It's a different product than Search.

I'm not going to argue about your interpretation of the word unlimited and wish that its use was either banned or strictly enforced in this (and similar) contexts. That said, until accountability is legislated and enforced, it is not reasonable to assume that unlimited means unlimited. Just as marketing abuses the word, customers abuse the concept. That's especially true in a domain where processes can be automated and distributed, by some means or others.

> it is not reasonable to assume that unlimited means unlimited

sure, but I am not abusing the unlimited plan. it is reasonable to assume that "unlimited" means that a normal user like myself will not run into limits.

If you’re not abusing it and are just using it like a normal user, you won’t hit the limit.

As far as you’re concerned, nothing will change, so I’m not sure why you think this is bad for you.

You seem very confident I will not hit the limit. So presumably you know where the limits are? Where are they?

It’s all written in the blog post

No it is not.

The article claims that 95% of users won't be affected when enforcing the policy. Assuming the claim is true, not affecting 95% of users is pretty much the definition of not affecting normal users.

That policy is there because some users were incurring >$500 in AI costs in ultimate.

Out of tens of thousands of users, the top 100 were using 48% of total AI costs.

Kagi is bootstrapped, it can't just hemorrhage money like this the way the VC-subsidized AI startups do

That is totally unsurprising. I would be curious to see what they are doing to achieve that. Likely automating something and not using it like a typical human would.

No! Are you wilfully misrepresenting this?

You currently pay for unlimited X.

Now you get unlimited X + limited Y.

More.

I'm going to take a charitable interpretation of your post and assume that you have simply misunderstood Kagi subscription tiers, and you have mistakenly assumed that I was on the first tier. I am not on the first tier. I am on the tier which they continue to advertise with the words "Unlimited Kagi Assistant". That is the product I am paying for. Now, instead of getting "Unlimited Kagi Assistant", I am getting "Limited Kagi Assistant".

It’s probably worth noting that they do offer a refund of your subscription price if you don’t perform searches in a given month, which is pretty much the opposite of how every other company with a subscription works.

It wasn’t a day one feature, so there’s some chance that a thing like this could roll out.

The article probably focuses on the overage because that’s what most users are going to be concerned about.

Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests of their users and balance that against making enough money to keep existing.

This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.

Huh? The title of the blog post is "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users!". Their users are people paying for what up until now was just their search service. They're now rolling in Assistant as a value-add. Your subscription price didn't increase. You're strictly getting more for what you were already paying. If you don't use it all, you're no worse off than you were yesterday.

If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something together with Open WebUI pretty easily.

I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would have been convenient if they could occasionally access Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.

That is a fair point. Considering the alternatives and realities Kagi is way too cheap for the life improvement it provides.

Is it fair enough to ask your favorite restaurant to lower the bill because you didn't eat the two last franch fries ?

If it's a subscription and someone else can eat the fries, of course?

Yeah I concur.

As an early adopter I first got forced off my grandfather plan to the regular one(at least I got a T-shirt). Now I have a limited number of searches that I have to keep track of and this has made me only use Kagi if necessary. This has dropped my number of searches significantly but at the end of the year I’m still being charged for renewing my plan even though I haven’t used a quarter of my allotted searches.

I don’t care about LLMs so this brings nothing of value to me. Give me an email account or some backup storage and open source office suite and I would be willing to pay and pay more.

I’m seriously considering not re-newing my subscription for the first time in ages.

The $10 plan has unlimited searches again.

And this isn't anything that has changed recently. It's been unlimited since 2023.

How do you use kagi and not know the basic plan has unlimited searches and has had it for ages?

It doesn’t, I use the starter plan, that’s the lowest paid tie.

The basic plan has 300 searches.

Then don't renew. Nobody is forcing you to pay for the service, and from what you wrote, it sounds like the service is not what you need/want (anymore).

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