Kagi Translate Is Back | Hacker News Reader

Kagi Translate Is Back

blog.kagi.com

43 pointstwapi17 comments

> Subscribers on Starter, Professional, Family, and Team plans will keep their existing Translate access through October 12, 2026 (UTC).

> After that, they will move to the free version of Kagi Translate.

As a pro subscriber since March of 2024...this doesn't feel nice. So I either need to fork up another $8 a month on top of my pro subscription or upgrade to Kagi Ultimate which would cost an extra $15 a month.

Because I'm willing to assume hitting the limit is going to be a whole lot easier even using the default translation settings and my sporadic usage of the service. Its not a service I rely on, but it was definitely nice to have. I'd rather not double my monthly subscription just to have (usable)access to kagi translate.

I'm more bewildered that they've limited our service as paying customers, restricting Kagi Translate. They have, however, not given any information on what our "free" limit will be.

I feel like it'll be quite restrictive. I use Translate maybe once every two to three months, but for those one or two days or a week I use it a lot. I'm not signing up for the translate service simultaneously just for that.

As a multi year subscriber I had the same thoughts/feelings when I found out that they want to charge me extra for using the search API when I'm already a pro member. It's very nickel and dimey for a company that I already pay $200 a year to.

API incurs very different usage patterns than humans do, That affects margins and professional plan was made years ago with human use in mind, not programatic access. Paying for only what you use for API is the most fair way to do it.

I think it would be nice to have a small monthly API allowance in the professional plan.

Absolutely, even for personal use sometimes you need API access like letting a local model access the internet or even a small python script to search and filter related research papers to your thesis. Limiting all API access behind another paywall is dirty.

I'm happy with this change. I love Kagi but don't use the translate feature enough to warrant being charged extra for it. If usage patterns are such they feel the need to do this I'm glad they made it separate instead of increasing my monthly cost.

As long as this does not represent a trend of splitting every feature off into its own subscription.

Transparently, what we have been discussing is to offer our keystone products (search, assistant, translate, email, ...) as standalone items. Then we will offer a all-in-one Kagi bundle that has everything under one payment.

The reason for this boils down to the following observations:

- Cost of operation at scale varies wildly between these, making it complicated to operate and manage cash flow

- Complexity for the consumer gets unruly as arbitrary things are limited to our fixed brackets of standard/pro/ultimate, we'll need some crazy matrix to explain what is included in each one

- Apprehension in our customer base about paying for things they don't want, chiefly AI related features. Some people just want search and don't want to pay for anything else, even if its included for free.

Itemizing our ecosystem addresses each of these by letting people pay for what they want, and ignore what they don't. If you want Kagi mail, you just get Kagi mail - there is no gymnastics of "I want Kagi mail, but I need extra storage so I need ultimate, but I don't need Assistant stuff, ...". From a business POV it will cleanly fund each initiative without everything competing for the same $10.

This is still on the whiteboard and not set in stone - so don't take what I'm saying as gospel - but it is generally where our heads are at in terms of managing the complexity of our offerings, cost of operation, and consumer piece of mind. It's a very difficult problem to navigate!

Edit: I mention Kagi Mail here, some people may not know but it is in a closed-ish beta at the moment - we hope to bring it to market by EOY!

I have to imagine assistant (AI usage) will be next, and swap to pay as you go. And search won't get cheaper because I imagine they've made the mistake of treating the unused AI credit as a subsidy for other services

If assistant goes away (it was already there when I subscribed) I'll just cancel my sub; 10 €/month + taxes only for search is wild.

Our $10 search sub price is solely based off of the cost of operating search and has remained unchanged for years (est. 2023), before we offered any LLM-based features as part of our plans.

We added AI features to the existing plans at no extra charge. The only thing we preempted was our Ultimate plan (which we initially offered with literally zero extra perks!), anticipating that LLMs would become more capable and popular and require a higher margin to operate at scale.

https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10

Why can't the AI budget be shared with translate?

I definitely don't use all of it from my duo plan, and it's passing through external costs.

Just charge the translate usage to that budget!?

Edit: and why am I reading about this on hacker news not in an email several months ago?

The first I remember seeing:

2026-06-02 https://kagi.com/changelog#10959

2026-06-25 https://blog.kagi.com/translate-update

The above two only disabled free access, due to costs. They mention that Kagi Translate would become a subscription service (so I pessmistic'ly assumed it would no longer be part of my existing subscription).

The 2026-29-10 announcement includes "As we roll out our unified Fair Use system, usage across Kagi Translate and Kagi Assistant will count toward a shared allowance.".

Kagi Translate has become my most used Kagi product. I would pay for API access

Kagi Translate is good software.

I think Kagi's product team actually uses their own software. I often have a small frustration with something and wish for some mitigating setting or change, then go look in the settings and find exactly what I want.

For example: automatically choose Japanese when entering kanji, and automatically strip HTML markup from pasted content.

Proof that you should never launch an unlimited anything. Calculate the costs and set explicit limits at initial launch. Otherwise people will freak out that you're taking things away from them when you later need to charge for increased limits

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