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Comment by chilldsgn | Hacker News Reader

I've been on the free tier for a short time and really liking it. I just can't justify paying at least $5 a month (I live in South Africa) for this, so not switching to paid yet. It's just a bit too much with our exchange rate.

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I’ve never even tried the free tier of Kagi because it’s limited and because the paid tiers are expensive (just like in your situation). I’m not looking for a free solution and I do pay for email (though not like tens of dollars a month, which is expensive).

Kagi’s official position is not to support regional pricing (visit https://kagifeedback.org/ and search for “regional pricing” to go through the “Implement regional pricing” thread). The service is probably out of reach even for many people in the first world. Even its family tier is expensive.

Hopefully, when it reaches a much higher number of users, it’s able to reduce prices. Or it can just remain a niche service and potentially be disrupted by a competitor.

I live in the US and the cost for unlimited search (which I would need because I do a lot of research) is too expensive for me as well. I was only able to get on by splitting it with a family plan.

Just out of curiosity, what would you consider a reasonable price for such a service in your region?

Not GP, and I’m in a totally different country than the GP, but I’d be willing to pay USD 2 a month for a duo plan. I’d be willing to pay on an annual basis too, since small monthly payments usually incur higher processing fees (percentage wise) for the seller. Just for comparison, this amount would be equivalent to a Spotify Premium Duo subscription (with its regional pricing).

I'd pay the price of a coffee, would gladly give up one cup a month for this. That's about the equivalent of $2.50

they should really move to geo-based pricing like some other SaaS do,

5usd in america aren't 5 usd in the rest of the world indeed

They probably have same costs for every user. They would be losing money if they charged significantly less for users in developing countries.

Well then they'll be stuck with the Starbucks sipping crowd.

My lattes are far less expensive than that.

They have fixed costs per query. Unlike VC-backed companies burning cash for market share, they need sustainable unit economics to stay profitable. This makes regional pricing hard to pull off.

I know I'm speaking form a position of privilege and this will be unpopular; but I'm not fond of subsidizing other users by paying premium prices for my subscriptions.

Also with regional pricing one must ensure the lock out all those people who want the service cheaper than in their country and try using VPNs or other means. Otherwise you loose even more money.

Does not neccessarily have to be done that way. It could also work like you pay for Kagi in country X, and get it localized for that country, using that language and prioritizing sites in that country and so on

Not that this couldn't be changed to the detriment of the service, but just to note: it's currently a feature to localise your results to any region

As someone in the EU/Schengen, I need results for 3 languages or 4 regions (if "worldwide" counts as one region) on a weekly basis. If a Dutch payment method would mean getting only Dutch results, it would be about as valuable as a newspaper with all pages about trade and international affairs blacked out: you'd need to buy it for every region you're interested in which probably surpasses the original price

One of the reasons I pay for Kagi is being able to get localized results from different countries, not just my own.

I hadn't thought about that

TBH, if i where them i'd be trying to serve open source models from my own infra, much cheaper to pay per GPU's per hour and batch process all your users prompts, than leave that big 95% fat margins to OpenAI and Anthropic

But I guess they have customers who want those APIs anyways, idk, again, i thought they where a search service, not an ai company, so this sub for llms business deal is weird from that POV? like great that it works for them to get money/customers but that doesnt seem their main point of existing?

That's largely under Kagi's control though. They don't seem to be working hard to reduce their expensive dependencies, instead choosing to focus on a number of other features/products. Maybe that's the better business strategy overall but it does limit their appeal to many potential customers.

I agree with you. I understand it's incredibly challenging to implement regional pricing, especially if your company is based in a 1st world country, and dependencies are also priced for 1st world countries.

The official response is that they won’t because 95% of their costs are in the search itself. I’m unable to figure out how to link to the forum thread, but you can visit https://kagifeedback.org/ and search for “regional pricing” to go through the “Implement regional pricing” thread.

they should really try to improve their margins on their main business imho, instead of doing side quests reselling openai credits?

If that's true, they may be at a point where 20% cost reduction takes 80% more work (or at least more customers to get more volume discounts), whereas reselling someone else's product is a quick win

I also find it steep. I've got several reservations such as always needing to be logged in on all devices where you want to use it / it being gated in general (most software projects I support are available to everyone equally) and the search results not being better than anything else, but 5$/month would be okay to support this concept... but that hasn't got enough searches included. You also pay double for image searches because it'll already incur a credit for the web results before you click on images

Skipping past the top two sponsored results in DDG really isn't that big a deal and still diversifies the search market from Google's monopoly, so paying the equivalent of a streaming subscription service... idk. None of my friends seem interested in paying for what is currently free (on top of the hassle of being logged in everywhere all the time) so sharing a duo/family account isn't an option for me either. Maybe that's something that would put it in reach for you?

Edit: apparently they've shared what it costs them to provide the service:

> a single search costs us 1.5 cents to deliver

https://kagifeedback.org/d/687-implement-regional-pricing/23

They charge 54€$/year for 3600 searches, which is.... precisely 1.5 cents per search. That sounds a little bit too convenient that the claimed cost price is precisely what they charge

This is either not the cost price or relies on people not using their subscription, otherwise you could never recoup R&D costs. Maybe this is total expenses divided by number of searches being run? I.e., it includes wages for the devs working on new features, their administration, etc. (fixed costs) and isn't actually the expense that each additional search incurs to deliver

DDG displays up to 2 ads above search results (most of the time I get none: trying just now, I saw 1 ad when doing two product searches and one knowledge search). The most favorable figure for 1000 ad impressions is 6$ according to <https://spideraf.com/learning-hub/what-is-the-average-cost-p...>. That's 0.6 cents per ad if the advertising network costs nothing. Advertising on DDG goes via Microsoft, so they'll take a cut: <https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/adverti...>. Guessing that they take 10% (I expect it's more), you're looking at 0.2 cents average revenue for each search I did just now. (Not a reliable figure but as a ballpark estimate.) DDG must have much lower costs somehow (maybe they just take results from Bing verbatim and have few costs of their own)

Their privacy pass thing lets you run searches in a way that doesn’t let them associate the query with your account, so the privacy half of the “always logged in” problem is mostly solved.

I switched from DDG. It saves me more than $10/month, both in time and in actual dollar costs due to suboptimal search engine results. It’s as simple as that.

The jump in improvement from google to ddg is probably bigger than the jump from ddg to kagi though. Also, I switched before ddg and kagi had AI search. Kagi’s AI is a huge differentiator for me, and I haven’t used the DDG one that much.

What would solve the "always logged in" problem is if I can enter a 6-digit PIN to use the service on a random computer or VM

I also can't associate searches I do for work with a personal account, and installing special software (this privacy pass client) is also iffy, so that's not going to work for people like me

Otherwise I'll have to use a publicly accessible search engine all the time anyway, since there's no way I can get my boss to pay for a search engine when I can't even get him to pay for our primary communications mechanism (calls and chat) that is hosted by a third party relying on donations

> This is either not the cost price or relies on people not using their subscription, otherwise you could never recoup R&D costs. It seems pretty save to assume that the average user will search less than 300 times when 300 is the limit. It’s of course possible for users to search exactly 300 each month before they stop searching or use an other provider, but my guess is that most people who regularly hit that limit will either stop using Kagi or move to a more expensive plan.

And that €54/$54 is the price when you pay per year, if you pay per month you’re paying more per search (although at least part of that extra money will go towards handling the payments)

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