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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

About a year ago, I tried the free 300 search trial. I liked it, but wasn't ready to commit to the expense.

This year, they offered me a free 30 day unlimited trial, so I'm about 10 days into that. I've only used 128 searches so far.

What I seem to find is that I use it, get to what I'm looking for, and move on. So it's not really on my mind. But it's subtly refreshing to spend less time fighting search to get what I want.

But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not. It does just seem to work for search, and I use it and move on.

I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?" But I also don't want to spend $120/year, because I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

View on HN

I finished my 30 day trial the other week, and went back to DDG. After a few days, I realized I didn't miss anything, so I'll happily stay with DDG. Perhaps I'm not a very discerning searcher. Most of my searches are bang-searches of Wikipedia or CPP or Python anyway.

Still, I'd be fine with supporting a sustainable search engine. $10/more is a bit too steep for my liking, though, measured against the utility I get from it.

10 dollars is like, a sandwich. Access to your search engine for a month is less useful than a sandwich?

Did you miss the part about them using DDG? They do have access to their search engine.

If the choice were between no search engine or paid search engine, then your point is a good one, but that's not the choice here.

I'm a very happy Kagi subscriber btw. I think it's worth the money. I love the personal uprank/downrank feature and Quick Answers personally and get a lot of value from them. But if I didn't use those it might not be worth it to me either.

> 10 dollars is like, a sandwich

In Silicon Valley?

Does Kagi only want to sell to techbros?

How much can a bana- er, sandwich cost?

I just checked McDonalds in my hometown in Idaho. A Big Mac is $5.99 for just the sandwich and $10.68 for a meal. A Double Quarter Pounder is $8.29 for just a sandwich.

McDonalds is definitely on the cheap side so $10.00 seems like a reasonable estimate of “sandwich money”.

No need to invoke tech bros or silicon valley. Certainly no need to invent a motive.

Nice troll. A footlong Ultimate BMT is $11.29 in Wichita before taxes (I just checked).

Kagi builds an excellent product for a very fair price. Direct your ire elsewhere.

A footlong is rather big for an average sandwich. Half of that is easily a large sandwich by themselves. So the cost for two large sandwiches.

Eating a sandwich over two sittings is easier than using 1 month subscription over two months, at least in my country.

$10 is a reasonable price for a sandwich in any decent sandwich shop in the US.

I live in Mississippi, crappiest economy in the nation. I assume people are thinking they meant the cost of a homemade bologna sandwich or something, otherwise this conversation is pretty absurd.

I'm in the capital city of Germany, a sandwich in the bakery around the corner is about 3-4 euros.

Wish I could say I was surprised. I bet the bread is better too.

^ In America, you have to remember that we overpay for crappier food.

Depends. Not always.

But there is this one shop selling shawarma sandwich made to fresh bread that costs 3.90€. And that is already a good lunch.

A döner sandwich can cost 2.90€ the cheapest.

Bakeries have baguettes with cheese and ham for 4-5 euros.

If you go to Mitte, a döner can already be 6-9 euros. And that is expensive.

Food is currently very, very expensive in the US.

Went to Europe a few years ago and I remembered previously that food prices in Europe were high. But this last time, I noticed they were consistently ~5 euro/dollars less than it would be in the US. I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s only gotten worse here. Typical restaurant entree is maybe 17 dollars. Fast food is now about 12 dollars for a meal. At least in DFW Texas.

I suspect the US definition of sandwich is different to the European one, but genuinely not sure. Curious — can someone give me a few examples describing the $10 sandwiches you get in the US? Are we talking warm, ordered off a menu, good quality meat, filling enough to serve as a meal?

This whole conversation has reminded me of the $5 milkshake conversation in Pulp Fiction.

I’ve signed up for the Kagi trial, so far I’m liking it. Breath of fresh air compared to the free ones. Best result, first position.

No, but they also don't wanna sell to the entire planet. There's definitely a market for a 10$ search engine, since it doesn't make money by maximizing eyeballs it doesn't have to cater to the planet.

Not everyone has a cooled mattress, AC, car etc.. "Are all those things only for techbros"?

$10 is many sandwiches.

It’s also less than a single sandwich. Not sure how “it depends on the sandwich” adds to the conversation. The point still remains.

The point they were making is: look, it's so cheap it's the cost of one sandwich.

Does that point still stand if it's not the cost of one sandwich, unless you're paying a fortune for a sandwich?

If a diff shop has a sandwich that is 90% as good and is free but has ads plastered all over the walls, I will probably take the free sandwich.

The cost of a sandwich ranges beyond $0.50 to $200.00. It depends on the sandwich adds about as much to the conversation as "it costs less than a sandwich".

And to be clear by "beyond" I mean some sandwiches cost less than $0.50, and some sandwiches cost more than $200.00

"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?"

The thing is, subscriptions do add up. Lots of folks are carrying a bunch of $10 a month subscriptions that individually are no big but when added up start tacking on $100-$200 a month to their bills.

I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.

Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.

I think it’s important to divide your subscriptions into different categories to make wise choices. My categories are utility, tools, entertainment, education, and 501c.

I have no problem paying for tools if the value is there, so I minimize my spending in other categories. Every quarter I review subscriptions, switch some from monthly to yearly to save money, cancel some, adjust levels on others.

If your point is that buying many things can add up to be expensive...yes? At what price point would you stop saying that is true? If it's 2 dollars someone would be listing all the things they buy for 2 dollars that add up to get expensive. Let's leave out the price of all our only fans subscriptions and consider the thing we're talking about

Kagi isn't competing against no access to a search engine, it's competing against Google, DDG, etc etc which are free (or more specifically, you could say ads are the cost).

Kagi needs to not just be worth $10, but also worth ($10 - ads) more than the alternatives.

It is EASILY worth that. It’s a tool that I use constantly every day for work and at home. I literally never fall back to using Google anymore. Google results turned to doggie doo years ago and getting what I need at the top of the list again is worth every penny. Kagi is like Google from 10 years ago if they had kept optimizing it for quality instead of enshitifying it to increase revenue.

I'm glad it provided you with that much value! When I gave Kagi a try, the results weren't as impactful for me, so paying for the service didn't make sense. Things have different values to different people, and that's okay.

I got a family subscription after saving on hotel bookings after using google, which impressed my wife. I like it for my children because not only does it return age appropriate results, there is no advertising targeting children. It works out $20/month for 6 people, a Christmas present for my sisters, mother and nephew that keeps giving.

Agreed. I've been a subscriber for over two years. At first the depth of search results was not as good as Google's but I used Kagi nonetheless because of the no-ad policy. Today, the results are just as good as Google's and still no ad, making Kagi a no-brainer in my eyes.

It always seems like there's no one less willing to pay for software than those who create it for a living

Pretty sure Kagi’s users are disproportionately software workers by a large margin, though.

It's a sandwich _subscription_. If you keep thinking like that, it's death by a thousand cuts.

I think that's sort of the nature of sandwiches. You have to keep paying for them if you want to keep eating them.

The nature of subscriptions is that you keep paying for them forever whether you're eating them or not. Maybe you forgot about your sandwiches and they're just piling up on your doorstep.

Kagi implemented automatic pausing on your subscription if you don't use it, so it's actually not the same here.

I think Kagi being nice is not a valid argument for accepting lots of low-cost subscriptions in your life.

Sure, but Kagi is one of the ones you'll get the value back out of. And if you don't use it you don't pay.

I only subscribe to Spotify, YouTube and Kagi as "online services". Video media I happily sail the seas for and I don't mind evil megacorps "losing" money on my behalf.

Ok, well I guess it's a good thing we're talking about kagi and not all your subscriptions, then.

For a myriad of reasons I'm cutting back on American subscriptions (am European). Kagi has a soft spot near my heart, so it is likely one of those going out last.

If sandwiches are $10 for you and not worth much, might I ask you to support my subscription instead? Because when I make a sandwich myself, the costs are approx 0,50 EUR, and that is the type of food I can afford.

It is the same with this 'it is only a cup of coffee' or 'only a beer'. I don't drink beer, I do drink coffee, but when I did drink beer the special beers were lower than the prices of the ones you pay in pubs. As for coffee, it just shows you're from San Francisco or something, cause we got free coffee at work in our culture here.

Moreover, there's enough people in this world for whom $10 a month is a huge deal, and all your comment shows is that you're either unaware of such or simply don't care.

Pro tip : there is a DuckDuckGo lite version

As my income drops in slow periods, I pause subscriptions to many things. The very last two I would be willing to give up are (n-1): YouTube Premium and (n): Kagi.

Switched to nebula when they removed YouTube lite and the price was double. Got no ads on my devices anyway.

For me, YouTube Premium (for family) is so worth it because:

- It removes ads for my kids, which are going to watch YouTube no matter what I do

- It includes YouTube Music, so I don't need a separate Spotify subscription

- It sends money to creators based on what I proportionally spend time watching, rather than based on how valuable of an audience I'm deemed to be when an ad slot is auctioned

- It is a signal that I'm willing to pay for content, and I want platforms and creators to continue offering that option

Rather send money directly to creators rather than filtering it through Google.

People just don't do that. If they did, the state of things wouldn't be the way it is. It's also kinda unfair to creators whose content people consume but just don't pay for in any way, because of a variety of possible reasons (they just don't even think about it, or they don't deem them "worthy" of being paid, or it's about having to go out of their way to pay someone, and then people only paying a limited amount of "chosen" people, etc.)

Firefox (and probably others) allows you to set up custom search engines (like Wikipedia). So when I know I am trying to get to Wikipedia or npm or whatever I just do an @wikipedia and type my search.

I’ve used keyword search for many years, maybe since Netscape. Set it up and type “w thing”, no quotes. Can be a lot shorter.

Yep, I prefer the Firefox keywords for various sites, and to disable search support entirely.

For those who haven't tried this yet: the bookmark for Wikipedia might look something like this:

    Name:    [SEARCH] WIKIPEDIA
    URL:     https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s
    Keyword: w

Then, when you want to do a Wikipedia search, go to the URL&search bar, and enter `w` as the first word, followed by the search term, such as `w cats`.

Also, you might want to disable the other search engine and portal page features as much as you can. This requires setting some preferences not on the Preferences pages, so going to `about:config` preferences, to set, e.g., `keyword.enabled` to false.

Note that you control the keywords. So I thought Wikipedia deserved a one-letter keyword. But `a` went to archive.org Wayback Machine (which also meant I could just prefix any URL with `a` and a space), while I made myself spell out `amazon` every time I was in danger of unnecessary consumerism.

Also, there’s a shortcut to make the entry. Right click on the search input of the desired page and select make keyword search.

Feel the same. I liked it during the trial, but not THAT much.

YMMV, but because search is my gateway to the web, I think of my Kagi subscription less like a charge for an optional service (like Netflix / Hulu), and more like paying an ISP to be my access to the web.

Watch out - I got the email offering a new 30 day free trial, and at the end of the month they did nothing to inform me and started charging the credit card they apparently still had on file from when I subscribed for a month or two a few years ago.

I guess with other companies I would’ve expected something like that and monitored the time more closely, but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

I will keep an eye on it, but I am 99.9% sure I've never paid them anything or given them any payment information! (I don't trust my brain as much as I did when I was younger, so perhaps I'm forgetting something. But I don't think so!)

That's weird because Kagi is one of the few subscriptions that gives me an email heads up days before they charge me during the normal monthly cycle.

I'm not sure if it's a Norwegian law or an EU law, but companies here are forced to regularly send reminders that you are subscribed to them, I've gotten them from all the major streaming services I've subscribed to.

Huh, Norway is not in the EU.

They are part of the European Economic Area, which means they belong to the EU market and their regulations (without voting rights), but they get to keep controlling their fisheries

So, in this context, they might as well be

They have access to the EU market through the EEA but do not abide to 100% of the EU rules, regulations or laws. And they can have their own rules/regulations/laws.

We lack such strong consumer protection laws in the US, so I'm pleasantly surprised when something so basic like this happens.

On the contrary, they are the rare SaaS that proactively avoids charging you any period you don't use it.

Interesting, because I brought this exact thing up last time Kagi was mentioned here, and the founder and billing engineer assured me that it does NOT convert to a subscription:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43308930

Hey,

As I mentioned in my previous comment, it does not convert IF you do not have a payment method set. In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.

I did mention a workaround we could do, and that's something that we will ensure gets done asap.

> In this instance they already had one set which Stripe takes as 'this user wants to renew' and instead decides to not cancel it.

Is this even legal? Ok, maybe in the US...

Hey, Engineer from Kagi here.

This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present. It should have also sent you an email about 7 days before it was going to renew.

With that said, I do understand how this may be unexpected. I will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users. Either way, if you contact support@kagi.com we can give you a full refund.

That comment from an actual human being, sir, more than anything else, would be by itself a reason for me to switch to Kagi everywhere.

Fortunately I already switched to Kagi everywhere...

Huh? They are scamming someone,

> I do understand how this may be unexpected.

is the answer, they claim that it is a bug at their partner, and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund. That's straight up illegal. Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.

How does this make you want to be their user?

Have you ever written software? Especially to manage payments? This is a very plausible bug around a corner case. Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers that they're also trying to win back, or maybe sometimes bugs happen.

Having bugs is okay.

That particular reply however is gross and controversial on so many levels.

If you have a bug at a partner, you don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected". If it affects multiple users, you don't do opt-in refunds (which is again, illegal, and is a scam if intentional).

> Maybe they're secretly twirling their evil mustaches figuring out how to scam their previous customers

They've just admitted it?

Dude what's your angle here. Scammers don't offer full refunds.

Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen.. And is also taking the user input back to his employer to hopefully find a way to improve the user experience.

It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you. You can argue that it's not a great customer experience.. But again, the engineer understands that.

> Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen..

Yep. That explains why is it gross, controversial, and admits a scam. Which is okay, I guess. I've read much worse. (For example, in this very thread. From the person I'm just answering.)

I was just surprised that someone reading it felt that he needs to give money Kagi immediately. We are different.

> It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you.

First, no, it's not legal. Especially with

    but with Kagi I expected better - especially since the email offering the new free trial promised “A month on us”, and said “Click here to activate your trial, no strings attached”.

Second, they at Kagi didn't want this (according to what they said). It just happened (again, according to what they said). No refunds tho (again, according to what they said).

I clearly skimmed the thread too much. The quote from your e-mail is definitely misleading.

I do not like to see a helpful engineer being given a hard time.. But that is a worse look for Kagi than I was aware of.

> will look into adding a workaround for this auto-renewal so that we can prevent that in the future for other users

What more do you want? A user complained, they offered a refund and they said they would look into fixing it.

Automatic refund everyone involved?

so should they refund everyone who had free trial and started paying afterwards? what if they wanted to start paying?

And what if they simply missed that it continued charging with the stripe email? It’s a dark pattern that they should fix.

They are fixing it. The only debate in this thread is whether they should automatically refund everybody who might have been affected, regardless whether that person intended to continue or not. That's a pretty different thing.

I don't see how this is a debate. People unsubscreibed Kagi, they never subscribed again, billing them is illegal, period. (And even if it were legal, why would anyone want to that in the first place? If I operated a business I most certainly wouldn't want to bill people that are not my users.)

"wHaT iF tHeY wAnTeD tO sTaRt pAyInG?" was just a joke on twisted cartoon scammer logic, not an argument.

Anyone that wants to use Kagi again can click on the subscribe button.

No that’s not it. The contention was around two things 1) the dark pattern and 2) should they refund everyone.

I get it, people love Kagi, I do too. But this is a bad pattern that they should never have allowed on the first occurrence.

Yes they said they are looking into fixing it but it was a soft commitment and they also should think about refunding folks.

> don't claim that it is intended and "I do understand how this may be unexpected".

This is why companies end up having PR people. An attempt to sound understanding can can easily be scuttled by an unfortunate choice of words. If the programmer had shortened that sentence to "I do understand.", there would not have been a chance to construe an attempt at downplaying the situation.

As far as I remember, this ‘try us again for 30 days’ promotion was explicitly for previous subscribers, so I would not say this was a corner case.

Ah, if that's true that does make this a little less excusable. I still don't think it's nefarious, but I do think it's a pretty bad and embarrasing bug on Kagi's part.

I realize Kagi is loved here, heck I use it myself but this pattern does come off at best lazy engineering and at worst scammy. Their marketing email pitches it off as no strings attached but there is a case where it will auto charge you at the end.

I think some of the ton is a little aggressive but it does seem like something that a lot of other companies would maybe get called out for.

I agree, they should definitely be called out for it. However, I also believe a little grace and understanding from the users is called for. They're a small team trying to do their best, and they've taken concrete steps in the past demonstrating their committment to customer service (i.e. not charging you for a month if you don't use your subscription).

I will admit that I do have a reflexive allergy to conspiracy theories when people jump way over Occam's Razor to get there with little to no evidence, and saying that Kagi is just a "scam" is firmly in that boat IMHO.

> and they offer opt-in (not automatic) refund.

Please consider whether they can authenticate a user based on an HN comment and HN profile. The request for the user contact the company directly makes sense.

> Also controversial, like, if it's a bug, why isn't the refund automatic in the first place.

Have they known about the bug before? For how long? Perhaps it's not an automatic refund because they need to confirm the underlying issue, figure out which users are affected, and only then get management to to sign off on it.

Egg on face from Hackernews has been known to turn the eye of even Google.

There is tremendous power here.

It’s plausible that I didn’t see the email because it got spam filtered away, so I totally believe that one was sent.

On contacting support: to your (Kagi’s) credit, Kagi did cancel the subscription and refund the fee after I contacted support. But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons, I suspect it may have been a few months before I noticed.

[edit: Thinking more: if their ‘no fee if you don’t use it’ policy actually works, I guess I wouldn’t be charged more than the one month. Although that makes it even less likely I’d’ve noticed.]

Depending on the dates, "no fee if you don't use it" might not have been in place yet

> But if I hadn’t been scrutinising my credit card statements for other reasons

A bit off-topic, but rather than scrutinizing credit card statements, I find it much better to get email notifications of transactions - that way I can review transactions as they’re made and fresh in mind, and I notice fraudulent or unwanted transactions right away.

> This is not something we intentionally do here, and is a feature of Stripe to automatically renew at the end of a trial if there is a payment method present.

Blaming Stripe?

> Blaming Stripe?

Explaining Stripe?

Email is not the best notification method these days. I'd suggest having a notifications delivered directly in kagi's interface as well. Maybe a banner for an ending trial period.

I have been using Kagi since the start. You guys are doing an incredible job.

Hey, I've been a subscriber for a while. I love it. I wear the tshirt.

Thank you.

Thank you for stepping up but here's a tip - don't blame Stripe. If you use a 3p in your service, it's now apart of your service and you're responsible for that.

I appreciated the extra detail, and took it as something "Here's what we think caused this, and we're taking responsibility for finding a way to prevent it."

A friend of mine and I split the cost of a family plan ($20/month) and that way we have four extra accounts to use for our family and the like. The amortized cost is pretty reasonable then.

I'm ok paying a few bucks simply because it gives the site a means of making money that isn't selling my data or tunneling me into some kind of marketing ML model.

And the results really do feel better. I almost never do the !g like I did with DuckDuckGo, and being able to set my own weights for sites is genuinely great. Instead of some arbitrary machine learning model, I have my actual intelligence to assist with the rankings.

> I don't like the 300 search limit, because it scratches my brain - "do I need to search for this? can I find it some other way? should I just use duckduckgo for this search?"

I have been using the free 300 search trial for several months now, and have not found it limiting. In a way, it highlights the strength of the search engine since I devote more time to reading the sites it directs me to than sifting through search results or refining my query. In other words, I am spending less time searching and more time pursuing the fruits of those searches. I am also okay with the idea of using different search engines for different purposes. I have a general idea of which queries will produce good results on DDG or Google, and use those search engines in those cases. I also have a general idea of which queries will generate terrible results on DDG or Google, and reach for Kagi in those cases.

> I'm largely allergic to subscriptions. Still, if I can spend $360/year on Disney/Hulu/Max, I should be able to upgrade my search experience.

I am allergic to subscriptions, which is likely why I am working within the bounds of Kagi's free trial for as long as I can. Once I have used up those queries, there will be a decision to make. Thankfully they are advertising $5/month for 300 queries. It's something that I can live with, even if I do go hog-wild with queries using the model that I have settled upon. Still, I have to get over that allergy first.

FWIW it's possible to replace the streaming services with something like Jellyfin+Radarr+Sonarr or Kodi+RealDebrid to cut the bill down to <$50/yr, and you also get access to media on all streaming services. leaves plenty of room in the budget for things that can't be self-hosted (like a proper search engine). some may cite ethical concerns but i don't think HBO execs making money hand over fist are concerned about ethics at all

Why not just avoid their services instead of pirating their content and matching the ethics of their execs?

Why not just do something else than watch shows your friends and family are watching?

Clearly, they enjoy the content. You don't just stop enjoying things like that.

I think the point the OP is making is that just because you can doesn't mean you should. And I agree.

If you feel streamers are offering a bad deal, don't take them up on the deal and find something else to do. If you want to watch shows your friends and family are watching, take the deal.

Ah, I thought they were just confused.

Hey, what do you do for living? Can I have some of that for free?

Sure! https://kagi.com/search?q=how+to+make+websites&r=us&sh=jJWfn...

Oh wow, thank you.

because their services aren't fungible

It's not piracy because they've made it clear that digital ownership is not actually ownership.

As someone who has several friends and family who work in the mid / lower tiers of the entertainment industry... if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act. Are entertainment execs grossly overpaid and exploitative? Sure - not unlike many industries. But lower revenue and lower subscriber numbers do have an impact on the money that trickles down (yes, trickles, sadly) to employees.

I say this mostly because the tech set seems OK with content piracy in a way that they wouldn't be OK with say, shoplifting. I don't see people recommending walking out with a pair of Airpods from best buy because of Apple's ethical breaches.

You should be more worried about Meta doing piracy than individuals: https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-t...

Why? They've gave it back to society in form of Llama models; it's a great and strongly positive development.

So copyright matters only sometimes? If that’s so, I bet anyone who consumed pirated content has had some positive impact on the society because of it.

The ends justifying the means is a pretty popular argument these days.

I agree, and I am?

Shoplifting and copyright violation are not comparable.

Most of us on this site produce copyrighted works for money. Many of us are pretty knowledgable about how copyright works, as it's an integral part of our livelihood. So please don't try to promulgate that weird media industry propaganda here.

Ah yeah the weird propaganda that people labor to make creative output, and if you value that output and have the means, you should consider paying for it.

Also, read what I wrote: "if you want to pirate, fine, but don't act like you're performing a noble act". What specifically bugs me is less so the act - I assume few among us haven't engaged in illegal streaming, paywall bypassing, password sharing etc. - it's the weird contortions people go through to frame piracy as a noble endeavor vs. just admitting they're being too cheap to pay for something.

For me it is rather can no longer afford, and cutting back on dependency on USA.

But if I understand correctly, you aren't cutting back your dependence on the US. You are cutting back on paying for your dependence. If you really want to cut back, consume non-US media.

They are quite comparable, and it's not media industry propaganda. I'm old enough to remember life before mp3 sharing. The only way to get music was from a CD, bought or stolen. I didn't steal CDs, so when "free" mp3s were available, I didn't take them either.

Commit theft if you want, but be an adult and acknowledge it for what it is.

As long as your time is worth <$50/yr...

Just FYI, if you run out of your 300, you can simply renew on that date. So if 300 searches lasts you 21 days, you're effectively paying between $5 and $10 per month. If you run out halfway, though, it's cheaper to pay for unlimited.

That's interesting. It makes you think about searching. It makes you think about the limits, it makes you think about the fact you already paying them for the privilege, it occupies just a little bit of your mind.

It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.

> But I have not objectively done comparisons to try to figure out if it's better or not.

The default search results are nice quality, comparable to Google (they use Google as one of their sources for results). The customization is what makes it head and shoulders better than the rest. I usually don't even see Kagi. In my workflow. Combining snaps, ! (I'm feeling lucky bang), and account level raising and lowering, I can pretty much get exactly where I want on the web just from a query in my URL bar that navigates straight there.

I justify it by having less Disney/Hulu/Max and I’ve just cut down on entertainment related subscriptions in general, although you can pry YouTube Premium from my cold dead hands.

Kagi is one of the few subscriptions I think is 100% worth the price. In fact, I’d pay double. Very happy user for almost two years.

I think part of what's tough is I use two search engines + 2 LLM's, depending on what I'm trying to do. It's easy when most of them are free, but if I'm going to pay money it needs to be much better than the rest, and I don't think Kagi is.

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