Hacker News Reader

Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

Kagi seems to be one of the few companies that put out services, genuinely trying to fix things with good intent. I hope it stays that way.

(I was very skeptical about Kagi Assistant but now i am a happy Kagi Ultimate subscriber).

View on HN

I like assistant, but I use Claude directly mostly. It's handy for really quick stuff though.

I like that Kagi charges for their service, so their motive is to provide services for that cost, and not with ads on top of it.

It feels much less slimy to pay a nominal fee for a service than it does to use a "free" service and wonder about how / to what extent your data is being exploited.

100% agree. Free services have their place, but I'd love to have more paid service alternatives for derives that only exist as "free".

That said, all my friends think I'm insane and poke fun at me for paying for search, so I imagine we're a small minority.

People just hate paying for software in general in my experience, especially a subscription.

I have multiple good friends who refuse to pay 99 cents a month to get 50gb of iCloud storage so they can backup their phones, and instead of all their precious memories on a single device that is out and about.

I think the whole "if it's free, you're the product" nugget of information has not been broadly understood by folks, or if it has, maybe folks don't care as much about their data.

I do live these days with the understanding that pretty much all of my personal info is out there one way or another, a social security number is about as private as a phone number these days.

I think people genuinely don't realize how invasive the data gathered is. If they knew what engineers and admins can see, they'd be floored

Totally, I think there are lots of assumptions of its just the data they explicitly put into the system, eg: "likes", "comments", "photos", but not the darker side of correlating activity across sites, interests, building profiles of you, selling your history, etc.

It's pretty well established that people are just generally irrational about free things. Because of this, I think any business model involving giving something away for free, whether it's a loss leader or or ad supported or something else, is fundamentally anti-competetive. Cognitive biases place any competitor charging for the good/service at a disadvantage. If you're a non profit, go ahead and give things away. If you're a business, you should have to charge.

It gets worse the more you think about it. When you are paid by how much attention you give, clickbait and ragebait thrives.

I'm curious, aside from pricing, what utility do you get from Assistant that you wouldn't from just subscribing directly to a single LLM?

Actually, i get the news search with a quick answer and a link to the assistent and not a single LLM but practically all LLMs in one interface and can link and share the chats. The Interface is nice, simple and Kagi is very up to date regarding new LLMs (it already contains Sonnet 4.5, for example).

It's just a nice interface for all LLMs which i often use on mobile or laptop for various work and also private tasks.

The last months have shown that there is no single LLM worth investing in (todays "top" LLM is tomorrows second-in-class).

The Kagi implementation can use Kagi search and can use advanced features of search like lenses. This isn't a unique feature but if you believe Kagi search is better than whoever Anthropic/OpenAI are using it's a nice plus.

Kagi's contracts with LLM providers are the ones businesses get with actual privacy protections which is also nice.

KI multi-step asisstant. Being able to try out all the llms in one subscription. Search integration with Kagi which means AI can really search only pages I want. And my settings for search as well.

> subscribing directly to a single LLM

You get multiple LLM in a single interface, with a single login and a single subscription to maintain, all your threads stored at the same place, the ability to switch between models in a thread, custom models...

I used Kagi search for awhile but eventually switched back to google because Kagi location aware search sucks. It might be better nowadays. I’ve been living on their browser Orion for a few weeks now though and it’s great. It works about 90% of the time which is impressive for a browser that isn’t tested alongside the big 4

What do you mean 90%? Orion is WebKit under the hood, so any failures would be surprising.

Clearly there is divergence. Examples that I run into on a daily basis:

My credit union login does an infinite redirect on login. Works fine on Chrome (and all other major browsers)

Perplexity on the mobile version web search entirely broken. Loops with some error and becomes unresponsive. Works fine on safari.

Many other random stuff breaks at least a few times per day usually from login redirects and authentication. Extensions like 1Password have autofill only working some of the time. The list goes on

They use a custom fork of WebKit with many features added

Most of their failures are usually on their custom features instead of basic WebKit / Safari functionality, in my experience. As a basic browser it’s great, but I consistently have issues with 1Password logins, especially if passkeys are involved. That isn’t necessarily their fault but the end result of me being unable to use their browser is the same. And if I’m going to use a basic browser I might as well use Safari and not deal with any third party software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com