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.
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.
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!