Hello, I looked at Kagi and found it too expensive. I'm a paying user for many software I use: vpn, email, git to list a few. And i am willing to pay a reasonable price for a search service. To put it in to perspective, my vpn costs less than $9 a month and I use it for high speed multimedia streaming, video games with no limits on usage. I hope you can come up with more reasonable pricing plans or consider open-sourcing the software. In which case I'll support it as a matter of principle.
We are trying to find a way to return to $10/mo unlimited searches. It is not for the lack of trying that we are not there already and we are trying to ensure Kagi's long term sustainability. Very grateful to all our customers supporting us in this period.
$10/mo for unlimited searches would be great.
I recently subscribed to Kagi. So unlucky I don’t have the early adopters benefit. Kagi is a great product. But constantly having to think about my included amount of searches and making the the decision whether to use Kagi or a free search engine is making it kind of impractical to me. As long as there is the need to constantly switch between two search engines, I can no longer justify the high price for Kagi.
I'm luckily grandfathered in, but I know a fair number of my searches are just coming from me having a background tab open with search results to come back to later.
This is a bit off-topic, but sadly, I have to agree. I AM a paying Kagi user, but the new limits have hit me extremely hard. I'm now paying twice as much per month and still almost hitting my monthly limit. I really don't want Kagi to go away but I think they have to adjust their prices if they want to keep thier customers around, me included
Same here. I was a customer for a long time and loved the service, but having to watch my “search spend” and constantly going over limits is really annoying. I ended up cancelling but I really wish I didn’t.
Personally I’d like to see an ad-supported, or partially ad-supported version that isn’t evil.
The way Google started out with relevant ads in the sidebar or a single relevant ad at the top is acceptable in my opinion if it means bring the cost way down for the end user and ensuring sustainability for the company.
I don’t think asking users to shell out $10, $20, $30 per month for search is a viable long term model that’ll ever appeal to the masses.
I'm not a Kagi user (yet) but I think you're missing the point.
In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you. The converse, just display a random ad, is not valuable to advertizers and they won't pay for it.
Equally, the kagi user base is so small that even if I -wanted- to put an ad on Kagi, I'd get very few impressions per month.
Lastly given that the user base is self-selecting as a group paying money not to see ads, my ads will likely get no clicks.
Thus, imo, you can be subscription supported, or ad supported but not both.
At least you'd want to track user language. There are many words that are spelled the same in different languages but have completely different meanings. Just one example.
>In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you.
I don't think so. Selling ads based on keywords in search terms has always been a viable strategy.
But you're right about Kagi's current user base. Selling yourself as an ad-free alternative and then introducing ads sounds difficult to say the least.
It matters to me because I believe the results are organically rated, i.e. nobody paid my search provider directly for top results.
With Google you become used to skip the first paid results that visually differ every so slightly — so much so that less technically inclined people, when I observe them, will click the paid results not knowing the difference.
I believe that, currently, Kagi is not building a profile of me based on my searches.
Basically, if I’m searching for something, and I’m not looking to buy something, the search is a lot more honest and a lot less stressful.
Ads on other sites can be adblocked, this is orthogonal; you can block ads on Google, but I just don’t trust that the algorithms are in my best interest, because I didn’t pay for anything.
How does any of that effect the fact that the results will probably be the same, taking you to the same page as bing or google, which in turn are ad supported?
Not really. Kagi weeds out those pretty well in practice. The results are mostly same as from Google, but the crap is removed and organic sites get a boost.
The only place where Kagi is mostly worse is figuring out that the query is actually about a specific place and results should point to a map. At least for me.
Which makes sense. There are no Kagi maps. It might be interesting to leverage OSM.
> Not really. Kagi weeds out those pretty well in practice. The results are mostly same as from Google, but the crap is removed and organic sites get a boost.
It doesn't do that because that's impossible. If you search for something that's in the news, you visit the news site retrieved by the search engine. That has no bearing on the fact that site will, most likely, be heavily ad supported, most likely.
> organic sites get a boost.
Sorry but I can't infer any meaning from that fragment. What is an "organic site"?
Please see their article [1] for details, before claiming something is impossible.
TL;DR: They check how many ads and trackers are on websites and punish those in the sorting.
Most of the useless websites are full of affiliate links, ads and tracking so they naturally get downgraded.
If you’re talking about a niche topic with only one result you obviously still get that one result, but I’d argue for most search terms the issue lies in ordering the very many results.
The pricing for Kagi is reasonable, even cheap. I think you're doing the mistake of comparing a normally priced product with a great bargain product like your VPN.
Just because two things are on the computer doesn't mean their prices are comparable. Go to a bar and get a drink for $9 and you won't raise an eyebrow at the price, even though your VPN is immensely more useful to you. If you pay for parking downtown you won't write a comment on HN about it, even though you pay the same price for a couple of hours of parking as you pay for watching Netflix every evening the whole month. You get a meal in a restaurant for the same price as you pay for bed sheets that you use for hundreds or even thousands of hours.
Kagi is very reasonably priced for the quality of life increase the better search results give.
Hi notcensored02, thanks for the comment, and I get where you are coming from. But, I don't think it was ever free to host your own services since we have to pay to buy computers to use as servers, electricity, internet connection and since the ISPs broke the internet, IP addresses. In some sense, the problem was companies starting to offer these things FOC except we didn't realize the true cost of it then.
I make youtube videos empowering people, showing them how to do many things that might otherwise cost them money if they didn't know better.
The last few videos I made were
1. How to download, decrypt, and OCR (searchable text) books from the internet archive using Debian Linux and python3.
2. How to run your own Jitsi Meet voip WebRTC voice chat web server which allows for end-to-end-encryption.
3. How to download published papers from scihub because they don't actually cost $40 each for a 2MB pdf file.
I think people forgot the spirit of the internet, and I won't allow it to be forgotten. The internet is not television 2.0. It's already way too commercialized as it is. People are trying to charge money for ambient audio sleep apps now. It needs to be discouraged.
----------- This website continues to delete my comments. It's one of the most locked down, censored websites I've ever seen, and I've been here since 1995. Here's what I ACTUALLY said.
Hi kovac. This is the internet. You don't pay for things. What the hell are you doing?
You guys need to stop paying for crap. This stuff has been historically free. With more and more people paying for things that have been free, pretty soon they'll be trying to charge for BROWSERS. Hi. KNOCK IT OFF.
I’ve asked the Kagi team before to provide a pay-per-search option.
Of course, I would pay 2c per search! Or even 5c. Or maybe even 10c!
But, no, I’m not going to pay a lump sum up front. And certainly not every month through a subscription.
There are good paywall options out there that don’t eat into your % and that are effortless to set up. The user on the paying end doesn’t have to make a profile with the payment processor, either.
Just to be clear: I know Yalls runs on the bitcoin "Lightning Network." I am fully aware that many HN readers don't see the use case for bitcoin yet. It is my firm conviction, if micropayments had existed earlier in the development phase of the internet, we wouldn't be flooded by adds today.
The Lighting network allows for such payments, as little as a fraction of a dollar cent.
Users don't even need to know or see that in the background you're running your payment rails over bitcoin. A wallet like BBW can simply show you a dollar amount, and when paying, all the uses sees is that he paid a few dollar cents.
I think that the current obstinacy or refusal to use the micropayment tools that exist today are holding us back and are keeping the world firmly in the grasp of Big Advertising.
And I get it: the market if flooded by nonsense "crypto" coins or nonsense NFT projects, that are obvious scams or money grabs. Numerous early websites were plain nonsense, and plenty of people thought that because of that, the Internet would go nowhere. Some pushed through though and saw the bright future behind the clouds.
