I'm a mostly happy subscriber, and this doesn't strike me as a good move at all. I'm all for learning to pay our way and moving past ad sponsored data harvesting - that's why I'm spending...
Exemplary
I'm a mostly happy subscriber, and this doesn't strike me as a good move at all. I'm all for learning to pay our way and moving past ad sponsored data harvesting - that's why I'm spending $10/month on search in the first place - but I absolutely do not need the mental overhead of even slightly pausing to think about whether a given search is worth it.
Usage limits, almost regardless of scale, impose a huge psychological barrier even if you're far from hitting them. Even suggesting the idea of counting your searches and rationing them out seems like just terrible marketing practice, and a very overly-practical programmer type way to approach the problem (said as a programmer myself). Marketers spend billions to attach positive emotions to their brand, and Kagi are here choosing to do the exact opposite. They're already fighting an uphill battle against free services, so adding a layer of constant, persistent usage anxiety on top of that is just neglecting basic consumer psychology.
All of that applies to any usage limit, even one with a ton of headroom. In this case, there is really, really not a ton of headroom. Maybe the average person searches 100 times per month as they suggest, but I've just checked my usage and I did 74 on Monday. That was unusually high, but I've broken 1000 (the highest "early adopter" tier) every month so far - although only by 10-15% or so, meaning that I simultaneously will hit the limits but I'm not blasting through some insane level of resource usage that costs an order of magnitude more than I'm paying.
I get why they're doing this. I understand that they need to pay the bills. But it could have been done so much better. Split out the expensive AI products from the cheaper search. Tier on features rather than usage limits. Engage with extremely heavy users on a case by case basis if they're generating more real, actual server cost than, say, 3x their subscription payment over a rolling 3-6 month period.
Search is basic infrastructure, and rationing it isn't a savvy decision to ensure financial stability, it's a psychological time bomb. When I saw the headline, I immediately assumed it meant I'd be getting bumped up to a $15 tier - which wouldn't be ideal, but I also wouldn't really have thought about it twice. As it is, I'm realistically only being bumped up to about $12, yet I'm genuinely wound up and irritated by the approach. They're making me think about something that I never previously had to even consider, and think about it in a mildly concerning way, 50+ times a day. That emotional association is absolute kryptonite to a brand.
I'm of the opinion, more and more these days, that complete transparency in costs to run the business is becoming a necessity for me to agree to a subscription plan. For me it's not just weighing...
I get why they're doing this. I understand that they need to pay the bills.
I'm of the opinion, more and more these days, that complete transparency in costs to run the business is becoming a necessity for me to agree to a subscription plan. For me it's not just weighing the benefits of the service, but also what I determine to be justifiable expenses and, when at that point, profit levels. For example I stopped my Wikipedia donation this year because I disagree with their ever increasing budget and believe they have more than enough money already.
I get that right now, as is typical with early adopters, most are heavy users and they have published (although I don't know how up-to-date it is) their cost-per-search data, but I agree that rate limiting isn't the way to go. Unlimited data, minutes, text are the norm for cell phone plans for a reason (at least in the US) and while none are truly "unlimited" they give it to everyone and rate limit the highest users.
I was already a net-negative for Google (ad blockers, pi-hole, throwaway email address used for search, and more often than not I use a private window for search anyway), obfuscating is trivial at this point, and most of the features Kagi is offering to adjust search is already doable with extensions/scripts. So it's a hard sell to convince me to buy in with them at this rate limited price increase.
Add to it this announcement goes back on their grandfathered in promise. Kagi's claims to privacy is intrinsically linked to their capacity to keep their word. If they say one thing and do another with pricing, how can they be trusted to do what they say when it comes to privacy?
Kagi is, I think, being reasonably transparent about costs; the problem is that their search method is, I think, intentionally unsustainable: until they have their own crawling and indexes,...
I'm of the opinion, more and more these days, that complete transparency in costs to run the business is becoming a necessity for me to agree to a subscription plan.
Kagi is, I think, being reasonably transparent about costs; the problem is that their search method is, I think, intentionally unsustainable: until they have their own crawling and indexes, they're aggregating and reorganizing results from search indexes with paid APIs.
But it seems like this ends up being enormously expensive, and doomed to make their costs infeasible unless they can implement their own indexes, because it seems like they're trying to compete by paying their competitors for results, and that seems like it will just result in their competitors raising their API prices: as the post suggests, search indexes are about to become several times more expensive".
Their justifications for the quota choices are problematic, and I'd be happier if they had simply left them out. Even though they do say that their users are not average users, and the average...
Maybe the average person searches 100 times per month as they suggest, but I've just checked my usage and I did 74 on Monday.
Their justifications for the quota choices are problematic, and I'd be happier if they had simply left them out. Even though they do say that their users are not average users, and the average Kagi user is searching 700 times per month, their use of statistics for usage of free search engines to justify quota choices doesn't make sense. A user paying for a service is likely to use it; a free website is likely to have a large number of very infrequent users pulling the average down. I find it very unlikely that someone is going to pay a monthly subscription and then only search three or four times a day.
I've renewed my subscription for a year, in order to keep unlimited searches, as I've been averaging over 1,000 a month. I'm expecting that in a year, Kagi will have likely worked out its business model, or will no longer be in business.
I was looking forward to their family plans to start pushing Kagi in my family home as a viable, no-friction alternative in a way that was not possible with DuckDuckGo, as that required...
I was looking forward to their family plans to start pushing Kagi in my family home as a viable, no-friction alternative in a way that was not possible with DuckDuckGo, as that required occasionally going back to google when results sucked. I also enjoy Kagi because of the removal of SEO bullshit results that plague every other search engine.
The additional mental load now required is not great. The fact that the larger family plan does nothing but allow more accounts in honestly sucks. Like, you pay 5 bucks more, but you don't actually "get" anything for it. You're still rate-limited to 1000 searches. You get to add more accounts, sure, but as far as I understand, Kagi doesn't actually do personal recommendation in searches, so accounts merely exist to control access, which means that you could honestly pick up the Early Adopter Professional Plan and then just share passwords, if there are no kids in the picture. Or, you can pay 5 bucks more, enjoy unmetered access and then just split the bill with 4 friends. Congratz, here's your 5 bucks a month unmetered access. So aside of the child protection features, I see zero purpose in the family plan, which sucks, cause I love Kagi, but it's not a 10 bucks a month feature.
I'm a dev myself, I understand they have bills to pay, but the 10 bucks are already a steep price and what they really need right now is to break into a bigger market. The casual plan is an interesting start but I think casual people are going to see the 200 search rate limit and be immediately turned off because it's not infinite.
It also isn't great that the early adopter bonus exclusively applies to the 10 dollar plan. I kind of want to reduce to 5 dollars because that's what makes most sense to me, and if I had those 300 extra searches on there too, it'd be lovely and mean I probably never have to pay more than 5 bucks.
I just have a hard time believing a single search costs as much as they say it does. Maybe it's a size issue, and the cost per query will go down as their userbase and infrastructure scale up. But...
I just have a hard time believing a single search costs as much as they say it does. Maybe it's a size issue, and the cost per query will go down as their userbase and infrastructure scale up. But it still seems high to me.
I'm also curious if they actually had enough power users performing more than 700 queries per month to make their old pricing untenable.
I’ve been using Kagi for a while now, so here are my actual usage numbers for the past few months: Dec 2022: 606 Jan 2023: 554 Feb 2023: 696 I am not a power user in the slightest, but I’m kind of...
I’ve been using Kagi for a while now, so here are my actual usage numbers for the past few months:
Dec 2022: 606
Jan 2023: 554
Feb 2023: 696
I am not a power user in the slightest, but I’m kind of surprised to see my totals this high. I think a lot of that is my own inefficiency in searching. Instead of using bangs (which don’t count to this total), I’ll just type something like “wikipedia mirror’s edge” into search.
I’m also bad about clicking the corrected spelling search link at the top, even when they already corrected my spelling for me. I’ll often fat finger a quick mobile search that’s almost incomprehensible and rely on Kagi to sort out what I mean, which it always does, but I’ll almost invariably click the corrected link anyway, which I’m assuming counts as two searches instead of one.
I would like to drop down to the $5 a month plan, as that “feels” like the right price for what I do (I don’t use any of their AI stuff, for example) and it’s much more affordable for me, but with my current usage that would actually end up being more expensive than staying on the $10 plan.
Not sure what I’m going to do. I might change plans and have to manually tweak my search habits, but I also like the freedom of not having to worry about my search count in the slightest. In general I like Kagi and have been happy with them, but I’ve also thought that the $10 per month I’m paying is pretty steep. I know comparing Kagi’s cost with “free” alternatives is misleading because other services are subsidized by ads and compromise my privacy, but I also don’t feel like I’m a $10 a month kind of user.
Update: I officially swapped back to DuckDuckGo. I’m a little sad about it. I really liked my time with Kagi. I signed on in August of last year and planned to just try it out for a month. That...
Update: I officially swapped back to DuckDuckGo.
I’m a little sad about it. I really liked my time with Kagi. I signed on in August of last year and planned to just try it out for a month. That one month rolled over into two, then three, and so on. Their search results are seriously good. It made internet search mostly frictionless again for me, which is something I haven’t felt in a long time — probably since the early days of Google.
I still didn’t plan to stay on with Kagi forever though. $10/month was too steep for me long term, but I had hopes their costs would come down over time. They announced that new pricing changes would come in January, so I hung around waiting for those which did end up coming out, albeit two months later (i.e. now).
After this announcement I’ve done a lot of thinking about the changes. Something about the announcement got under my skin, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly. Here are some of those assorted thoughts:
They cite an increase in indexer costs as part of their need for these changes. I’m not super techy, but it seems to me like, as a search company, Kagi should be working on being their own indexer rather than paying out to competitors? Like, isn’t that a top priority for their own autonomy? (Someone here please correct me if I’m wrong/misguided in thinking of this).
They also cite the inclusion of AI as part of their need for these changes. If the per-search cost was already a concern (as it was well before this pricing update), why add another cost on top of that, especially one as significant as AI?
$5/month yielding 200 searches comes out to only six or seven each day. This isn’t enough. It feels almost like decoy pricing: the bad plan that makes the others look better in comparison.
The lack of rollover searches feels… bad. All the messaging is about cost-per-search and paying a certain amount for a certain number, but if I don’t use all of them, they just disappear, and I’ll still be charged extra if I go over next month? I think they made a mistake trying to make the plans so precisely transactional but lacking in reciprocity. If I’m paying for a number of searches and not a flat subscription, then let me have them. I almost feel like a better plan would be to stratify by features and not search counts (e.g. a plan that includes custom domain weighting, one that includes AI, etc.).
This is kind of a minor nitpick, but it also feels like a subtle sidestep where they’re trying not to make things look too transactional: the searches included in the plans are called “free” searches when we are very much paying for them.
I know these points make it look like I’m mad at Kagi, and I am a little bit, but I’m also mad at the situation in general. Assuming I take Kagi at their word and that’s how much searching genuinely does cost, it highlights just how significantly the rest of the search market is subsidized by advertising and personal data. I hate that the options are either pay that way or pay this way.
This has been the general lesson from a lot of my deGoogling: alternatives are expensive.
I have no ill will against Kagi. I do think this pricing setup is a bit of a misfire (even ignoring my complaints above, I think it’s needlessly complicated). Nevertheless, I’d like to see them succeed. Their results were better than what I got elsewhere, and I do think private ad-free services are the future. I hope they do well enough that they’re able to bring their prices down and I eagerly resubscribe. Or maybe being back on DDG will remind me of what I didn’t like about it and make those high Kagi costs look better in comparison.
I worry that they’re in a bit of a bind though. When I made my first post about Kagi, I was surprised to learn that they pull some results from Google. This goes back to my point #1 above, but their dependency on their competitors makes me wary. If their indexers can cause such a big shift in their entire pricing plan by changing what they charge, what’s to say those indexers won’t just do that again, or cut off their access? In evaluating the somewhat sour taste in my mouth, I think it primarily comes down to this: it doesn’t feel right to me to pay that much to a search company if much of what they do is reselling another company’s results. Even if Kagi does a fantastic job of repackaging and presenting those results (and I think they do!), it still feels like they’re standing on very shaky and, at present, very expensive ground.
I've lurked around enough to answer some of your questions: Kagi was always unsustainable. The "payments to usage balance" portion of their site is a more accurate indication of what searches...
I've lurked around enough to answer some of your questions:
Kagi was always unsustainable. The "payments to usage balance" portion of their site is a more accurate indication of what searches actually cost them: looking at mine, I've used about twice as much as I've paid for.
Their incorporation of machine learning tools into Kagi - and previously, their maps, lenses, etc - is an attempt to add "value" that's not directly tied to the # of searches you make. They know that $25 a month is a ridiculously steep offering, and as they've hit a wall with cutting costs they want to make it a more attractive package.
Building an independent index is hard. They've done a number of trials with disabling the Google portion for some or all searches, and found it wrecked their search quality. Their existing index, Teclis, has been built to prioritize low-tracker websites and certainly helps the search rankings a bunch - but just doesn't have the reach of Googlebot.
I've also been priced out and will be switching away from Kagi, probably to StartPage + some userscripts.
Ah, I haven't written them yet! The feature of Kagi that I use the most is the boost/block domains function, so I'm going to try my hand at importing my blocked domains a la uBlock filters. Also...
Ah, I haven't written them yet! The feature of Kagi that I use the most is the boost/block domains function, so I'm going to try my hand at importing my blocked domains a la uBlock filters.
I've not tried Kagi, but your comments match most of my own thoughts as an outside observer. It makes sense, but it might be more expensive for them to do so than to simply rent from someone else....
I've not tried Kagi, but your comments match most of my own thoughts as an outside observer.
I’m not super techy, but it seems to me like, as a search company, Kagi should be working on being their own indexer rather than paying out to competitors?
It makes sense, but it might be more expensive for them to do so than to simply rent from someone else. Crawling every website, and doing it often enough to have fresh results is likely not easy. You'd need an awfully big pipe. But for a sophisticated search engine you'd also need to hit sites from multiple locations to discover things like automatic redirects (for regional search indexes), determine performance if that's a ranking metric, as well as for discovering cloaking (is the site treating bots differently from humans?).
There's also a lot of servers running automatic bot blocking software, and that often percolates up to networks. Most will let the big crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot through, but if your bot is too much of a nuisance, the server will start refusing to respond.
So that's a tough problem to solve. But of course the real hard part is taking that raw data and determining relevant keywords, link quality, domain authority, social connections, local relevance, and spam signals. Then tying in verticals such as maps, images, or news. Those all likely have their own unique ranking factors that need to be considered in the query.
Oh, and return the results in 32 millisecond.
So it is a tough problem! Many tough problems, actually. I feel for Kagi, and I respect what they're doing. But I don't have that much disposable income, I do a lot of internet searches, and I'm generally satisfied with the incumbents. So it's not for me at this time.
I do extremely similar things, and I'm wondering if all of these trivial or casual searches are why my usage numbers are so high. In addition to having it correct my spelling, I also bet switching...
I do extremely similar things, and I'm wondering if all of these trivial or casual searches are why my usage numbers are so high. In addition to having it correct my spelling, I also bet switching from the Web results page to the Image then Video results page and going back counts against me.
I'm not proud to admit it, but since I pretty much always have my browser open my computer, when I need to do some simple math things, I'll usually just enter it into the search bar, have it calculate that, then use that result in the next few calculations. So I definitely need to adjust whatever it is I am doing.
For now, what I did was just pay for the year plan so that I can at least have the Unlimited searches while I figure out how much I am willing to spend.
It should be a matter of pride that you choose the lowest resource intensive option to reach your objective. Intelligence is not about having answers, but finding the answers quickly and easily.
It should be a matter of pride that you choose the lowest resource intensive option to reach your objective. Intelligence is not about having answers, but finding the answers quickly and easily.
You are not alone! I do the exact same thing. One time I had a spreadsheet open and alt-tabbed to my browser to run a quick calculation out of habit, and my husband who was watching me nearly lost...
I'm not proud to admit it, but since I pretty much always have my browser open my computer, when I need to do some simple math things, I'll usually just enter it into the search bar, have it calculate that, then use that result in the next few calculations.
You are not alone! I do the exact same thing.
One time I had a spreadsheet open and alt-tabbed to my browser to run a quick calculation out of habit, and my husband who was watching me nearly lost his mind at my terrible workflow. 😂
I received two emails from Kagi today. The first email: The second email:
I received two emails from Kagi today.
The first email:
Dear valued customers,
I am writing to you today with a heavy heart to address the recent loss of approximately 200 customers who cancelled their Kagi membership following our pricing announcement. As a small company with a dedicated userbase, this loss has certainly left its mark.
First and foremost, I would like to extend my sincerest apologies for the poor execution of the pricing update announcement. It was not our intention to cause any inconvenience or disappointment among our loyal customers, and for that, we are truly sorry.
In the spirit of transparency and clarity, I would like to take this opportunity to provide additional explanations and clarifications on the matter, in hopes that you may reconsider your decision.
Please allow me to highlight a few key points:
We understand that change can be difficult, particularly when it involves pricing adjustments. However, the changes we made were necessary to ensure the sustainability of our company, and to continue providing you with the best possible search experience.
Our new pricing model is designed to be more flexible, with a range of options to suit different needs and budgets. While we acknowledge that the tiered plans plus pay per go system may take some getting used to, we believe that it is the best alternative when considering the increasing cost per search we are facing, the wildly uneven distribution of searches in our userbase, and Kagi's long-term sustainability.
We apologize for any confusion caused by our initial blog post, which lacked key explanations like for example regarding grandfathering. We have since updated the post for clarity and invite you to review it here https://blog.kagi.com/update-kagi-search-pricing
We would like to clarify that for most customers, the price will remain the same as before ($10), and those who search less than ~20 times/day will actually see a decrease in cost with the new plans. For those who search more than 1,000 times/month, the increase will be only $1.5 per 100 searches above 1,000.
We were using a home-brewed emailer, which was built the same day the email was sent (Kagi does not have a mailing list), and it took it almost 24h to email everyone. Because of this, many people saw the news on HN before getting the email, adding to the confusion.
We would like to invite you to a live community event on Discord on Tuesday at 1pm EST to answer any questions you may have. Here is the link to join [removed]
Lastly, I would like to recommend that if you still choose to maintain your decision, you consider re-subscribing for a brief period, specifically until the pricing update takes effect on Wednesday, to add the Early Adopter flag to your account. This will grant you automatic access to the Early Adopter Professional plan, which may prove beneficial if you decide to change your mind in the future.
Thank you for your understanding and consideration. We value your support and loyalty, and we hope to continue serving you in the future.
Sincerely,
Vlad
The second email:
Hi!
Vlad again and sorry for the quick follow up email. We’ve got some good feedback after the first email and I wanted to send a followup that includes this QA for everyone.
The best feedback we got is that we should simply enable the early-adopter flag for everyone who ever had a subscription prior to switch, not just for those with an active subscription at the time of switch, so we will be doing that.
Couple of more questions answered:
Q. Would you mind sharing insights on why did you decide not to grandfather the old accounts?
A. The reasons were:
We are already losing money on most accounts. Providing a service where you lose money per customer is not advisable for any bootstrapped business, let alone in the current economic climate which is predicted to get worse.
The model was not fair, the few people who searched less had to subsidize both people who search a lot and the free trial accounts. The new model ensures everyone pays their fair share
Cost per search actually went up significantly since September
The best we could do is still a lot (from a financial perspective): we are still honoring legacy accounts for up to a year and then offer them 1,000 instead of 700 searches (which still loses us money, but less and limited)
It is easy to lower prices, when circumstances change. Nobody would object to that. a lot of new legislation in EU suggests big tech will have to play by more approachable rules. But we need to survive until that moment
Circumstances changed. We also said in that same blog post from Sep that Kagi starter accounts will be $19/mo in the future and they are not. We simply got things wrong. Lesson learned: do not make promises, but instead outline options.
Q. What's weird to me is why resources are used to AI/Orion features that are costly to develop and use instead of focusing on getting break-even and/or product-market-fit?
A. We look at these as customer acquisition channels. Kagi spends no money on marketing and it is incredibly expensive to acquire a search engine customer. We’d rather spend money on creating long lasting products that can provide that function indefinitely (“planting the seeds”).
For example, Orion has been a major customer acquisition channel for Kagi and around 20% of our customers have found Kagi through Orion.
Q. The new plans with metered search after a threshold are weird.
A. The pricing plans are a result of three months of brainstorming, and yes I do not like them 100% either. But we did not have the luxury to wait more and figure it, we had to go with it. We have explored every other suggested alternative. Yes, we could advertise a $5/mo price for unlimited searches - and risk not being around in one year. So, do we optimize for short term growth or long term sustainability? We've chosen the latter.
I don't use Kagi and I'm not going to, but those emails are one of the best responses I have seen from a company. Still would've liked to see them outline plans to reduce prices in the future....
I don't use Kagi and I'm not going to, but those emails are one of the best responses I have seen from a company.
Still would've liked to see them outline plans to reduce prices in the future.
Right now it looks like they'll continue matching costs and trying to grow, and eventually a small, palatable markup over cost across a large user base will turn profit.
After seeing you post this (interestingly, I didn't get this e-mail despite being a customer!), I e-mailed Vlad to discuss the AI issue. We're about 9 emails deep at this point, and I don't know...
After seeing you post this (interestingly, I didn't get this e-mail despite being a customer!), I e-mailed Vlad to discuss the AI issue. We're about 9 emails deep at this point, and I don't know that I'm likely to convince him of anything, but we're having a good conversation. I suggest reaching out, he's quite interesting to talk to.
Rather interesting to see a statement like this after Vlad was brushing off complaints in the Kagi discord by saying that new people even signed up when users complained about the pricing changes...
I am writing to you today with a heavy heart to address the recent loss of approximately 200 customers who cancelled their Kagi membership following our pricing announcement.
Rather interesting to see a statement like this after Vlad was brushing off complaints in the Kagi discord by saying that new people even signed up when users complained about the pricing changes and worried that people will abandon the service.
It's still a good response, even though it gives me a sad satisfaction. I prepaid for a year of Kagi on the old plan, and I'll see where they'll be then. If not I'll probably have to mirror your action and return to DDG.
Going forward, it looks like for unlimited searches, Kagi offers a $25/month plan. This is quite a bump from the previous $10/month plan. Does anyone know of any other alternatives? I've heard...
Going forward, it looks like for unlimited searches, Kagi offers a $25/month plan. This is quite a bump from the previous $10/month plan. Does anyone know of any other alternatives? I've heard Neeva and SearX recommended but please share your experience if you've used either!
I signed up for a free Neeva account to try it out. They recommended I install their browser on iOS, which is billed as “100% ad-free and private”. If you scroll down to the app’s privacy report...
I signed up for a free Neeva account to try it out.
They recommended I install their browser on iOS, which is billed as “100% ad-free and private”.
If you scroll down to the app’s privacy report card, there’s a ton of stuff under the “Data Linked to You” category including location, contact info, and, ironically, search history.
That was enough to get me to rule out Neeva.
While I’m not super happy about Kagi’s price change, at least their browser has a squeaky clean privacy record.
Aww, that's a bummer. I really liked their LLM summarization for search results. Seems a bit of a hit-or-miss but this privacy issue is much more glaring... Thanks for the heads-up! Do post an...
Aww, that's a bummer. I really liked their LLM summarization for search results. Seems a bit of a hit-or-miss but this privacy issue is much more glaring... Thanks for the heads-up! Do post an update if you end up switching to a different search engine from Kagi!
I’m going to switch back to DuckDuckGo. I think their results are a lot worse than Kagi’s, but $10 a month is too steep for me for the long term, especially if I have to be worried about going...
I’m going to switch back to DuckDuckGo.
I think their results are a lot worse than Kagi’s, but $10 a month is too steep for me for the long term, especially if I have to be worried about going over a limit.
I considered trying Startpage, but it looks like there isn’t a way to make it the default search on iOS, which is where maybe 70% of my searches come from.
I've used Hyperweb on my iPad to change my search engine to a custom one. I think it should support any search engine since it uses a query string and replaces part of it with your input!
I've used Hyperweb on my iPad to change my search engine to a custom one. I think it should support any search engine since it uses a query string and replaces part of it with your input!
I've been using a self-hosted SearXNG instance for about a year or so now, with the DDG and Google backends enabled for general search. The quality is pretty good, very similar to Kagi for...
I've been using a self-hosted SearXNG instance for about a year or so now, with the DDG and Google backends enabled for general search. The quality is pretty good, very similar to Kagi for programming-oriented searches. My main complaint is that the engines sometimes take measures to block result scraping, so specific backends can break for a while until someone fixes it.
Kagi almost had me, as I had paid for a month to try it out the last time DDG results stopped working, and was just about ready to pull the trigger on switching to an annual plan, but then these pricing updates were announced and they lost me. It was already a tough sell at $10/mo for unlimited, but occasionally losing my DDG results in SearXNG for a few days feels less annoying than constantly worrying about how many "free" searches I have left.
Nonetheless, I'm doing my best not to support companies that are funding and promoting, specifically, generative models trained indiscriminately on copyrighted content.
Nonetheless, I'm doing my best not to support companies that are funding and promoting, specifically, generative models trained indiscriminately on copyrighted content.
As a standalone tool, I found the summarizer useful for getting a quick summary of YouTube videos I don't want to watch. (I have a policy of not watching anything other than music videos on...
As a standalone tool, I found the summarizer useful for getting a quick summary of YouTube videos I don't want to watch. (I have a policy of not watching anything other than music videos on YouTube.)
So I think there are uses for summarizers, but they might be somewhat specialized.
I just went through and counted my google usage for the last week and found that I searched 88, 46, 72, and 53 times Monday to Thursday this week. I thought that my weekend usage might be lower...
I just went through and counted my google usage for the last week and found that I searched 88, 46, 72, and 53 times Monday to Thursday this week. I thought that my weekend usage might be lower because I work on a computer for most of the day at work, which seems to be true sometimes. My searches per day on the weekend were 58 and 9. Assuming that this is an average week, that comes out to over 1500 searches/month.
While I do think that I get $25/month in value from the searches that I made and the results that come along with them, I can't help but think they are flighting an impossible uphill batter against Google and the rest of the free engines. If I was to be paying for a search service, I would want that to be my primary, go to engine for making searches and if I was unable to find what I wanted there I would move on to a different engine. I cannot imagine that I would have a good end user experience worrying about whether I would hit my cap all month.
Interestingly, not that I would ever want to have to think about this on a consistent basis while searching for things, as long as you are making less than 1700 searches a month it makes sense to get the Professional Tier and pay per search vs getting unlimited.
Related to my other comment: Kagi is not listed on PrivacyTools, is it because they're not free? StartPage is on there despite the information @wervenyt shared here (being acquired by a data...
Related to my other comment: Kagi is not listed on PrivacyTools, is it because they're not free? StartPage is on there despite the information @wervenyt shared here (being acquired by a data company).
Any thoughts on this from anyone? I usually trust PrivacyTools recommendations.
I would imagine it's because they're new (only been around a little over a year) more than anything. As an aside, though, PrivacyTools seems quite bought out. The top four out of five recommended...
I would imagine it's because they're new (only been around a little over a year) more than anything.
As an aside, though, PrivacyTools seems quite bought out. The top four out of five recommended VPNs are advertisements, really? I guess that should tell you something about Mullvad managing to stay on there...
Sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't valid high quality options. I'm pretty sure Nord and Mullvad have been there for along time, and same with ProtonMail and that company....
The top four out of five recommended VPNs are advertisements, really?
Sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't valid high quality options. I'm pretty sure Nord and Mullvad have been there for along time, and same with ProtonMail and that company.
I can't say I agree. I think regular old advertising is evil enough already, and any company that would stoop to bribes to increase their ranking is not to be trusted with a total record of what...
I can't say I agree. I think regular old advertising is evil enough already, and any company that would stoop to bribes to increase their ranking is not to be trusted with a total record of what you do on the internet.
I think 2 main reasons: Kagi is relatively new, and it is relatively small. I'm not involved but to make some guesses. As far as I know, PrivacyTools was originally (maybe still is) an open?,...
I think 2 main reasons: Kagi is relatively new, and it is relatively small.
I'm not involved but to make some guesses.
As far as I know, PrivacyTools was originally (maybe still is) an open?, crowd-sourced, community-oriented project that started on Reddit. It quickly gained a community with other users joining the project. Their GitHub page was originally https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io but was archived on June 24, 2022. It is somewhere at this point, maybe a few months before, when a group broke off to become Privacy Guides, and the two groups have a sort of beef between them.
I am unable to find if there is a public changelog, or a page with all of the PrivacyTools site changes and their dates other than that it is on v19.84 secure. I do believe that in order for a tool/site to be listed however, that it should match their criteria and also be suggested on this other site, so maybe Kagi was never suggested.
Before June 2022, Kagi was in closed beta and the only way to get access was to sign-up and wait to recieve an email invitation. I had only heard of it because a user here on Tildes recommended it. Kagi was, and still is relatively new and small in comparison to other search engines based on popularity. On A look at search engines with their own indexes - Seirdy it is listed as one of the smaller "Semi-independent indexes" that falls back to Google-Bing-Yandex (GBY) when attempting to find results. To my knowledge, Kagi had always had a free tier but with a limited number of searches.
So I’ve been a user of kagi and orion since early closed beta. I don’t use it often, because it has produced very inconsistent results for me. It’s primary output value is excluding clickbait/seo...
So I’ve been a user of kagi and orion since early closed beta. I don’t use it often, because it has produced very inconsistent results for me. It’s primary output value is excluding clickbait/seo results, which have been variable.
Then there’s the privacy value, which is important. And also the introduction and pursuit of the notion that producers ought to get paid decently, and I ought to provide a reasonable fee for services that are valuable to me.
That said, there is no information about that piece. It must be rolled into the reported costs per search. But how does that coat break down?
Also mildly concerning to me is, who is Vlad? He claims to be funding startup out of pocket to the tune of many millions of dollars. Who is this guy, that he has so much cash to burn?
Waaaay back in the day, decent search engines were funded by university departments. The costs can’t have been that exorbitant. Google came along and was way amazing better it seemed (especially for ultra minimalist interface), but yahoo, altavista, and webcrawler held their own on actual results. Were their costs per search the same?
https://kagi.ai/about.html As for costs waaaaaaaay back in the day, that's a really bad comparison. The web is orders of magnitude larger now than it was then and still growing exponentially. You...
Also mildly concerning to me is, who is Vlad? He claims to be funding startup out of pocket to the tune of many millions of dollars. Who is this guy, that he has so much cash to burn?
Founded in 2018 by Vladimir Prelovac, serial entrepreneur and former VP at GoDaddy, Kagi.ai is a product of extensive research and development in application of natural-language processing to web search
As for costs waaaaaaaay back in the day, that's a really bad comparison. The web is orders of magnitude larger now than it was then and still growing exponentially. You mention google... well speaking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers
There is no official data on how many servers are in Google data centers, but Gartner estimated in a July 2016 report that Google at the time had 2.5 million servers.
According to Google, their global data center operation electrical power ranges between 500 and 681 megawatts. The combined processing power of these servers might have reached from 20 to 100 petaflops in 2008.
The customer base is completely incomparable though. Kagi sent emails after a couple hundred customers left. Google serves much of Earth. Also, computers have advanced too.
The customer base is completely incomparable though. Kagi sent emails after a couple hundred customers left. Google serves much of Earth.
The customer base isn't comparable, but the expectation for quality results by Kagi's customers is similar, if not higher. Crawlers are relatively cheap to operate, anyone can do it... but quality...
The customer base isn't comparable, but the expectation for quality results by Kagi's customers is similar, if not higher. Crawlers are relatively cheap to operate, anyone can do it... but quality indexing requires immense computing power and storage space.
But, as far as I understand it, part of the reason Kagi is so expensive per search is because they actually don't do their own crawling or indexing. They pay for access to google and bing's indexes via their commercial APIs (which are expensive), and then have to pay for additional compute time to further refine and filter the results they get from those.
Does anyone use Startpage? To me it seems like the ideal choice: based on Google, which generally gives great results, but privacy oriented, anonymized and I don't see any ads, and, of course,...
Does anyone use Startpage? To me it seems like the ideal choice: based on Google, which generally gives great results, but privacy oriented, anonymized and I don't see any ads, and, of course, free.
I get that Kagi has some extra features, but I don't see it worth paying 10 bucks for.
Follow up from Privacy Guides where they approve StartPage:
Follow up from Privacy Guides where they approve StartPage:
Startpage's majority shareholder is System1 who is an adtech company. We don't believe that to be an issue as they have a distinctly separate privacy policy. The Privacy Guides team reached out to Startpage back in 2020 to clear up any concerns with System1's sizeable investment into the service. We were satisfied with the answers we received.
I'm a mostly happy subscriber, and this doesn't strike me as a good move at all. I'm all for learning to pay our way and moving past ad sponsored data harvesting - that's why I'm spending $10/month on search in the first place - but I absolutely do not need the mental overhead of even slightly pausing to think about whether a given search is worth it.
Usage limits, almost regardless of scale, impose a huge psychological barrier even if you're far from hitting them. Even suggesting the idea of counting your searches and rationing them out seems like just terrible marketing practice, and a very overly-practical programmer type way to approach the problem (said as a programmer myself). Marketers spend billions to attach positive emotions to their brand, and Kagi are here choosing to do the exact opposite. They're already fighting an uphill battle against free services, so adding a layer of constant, persistent usage anxiety on top of that is just neglecting basic consumer psychology.
All of that applies to any usage limit, even one with a ton of headroom. In this case, there is really, really not a ton of headroom. Maybe the average person searches 100 times per month as they suggest, but I've just checked my usage and I did 74 on Monday. That was unusually high, but I've broken 1000 (the highest "early adopter" tier) every month so far - although only by 10-15% or so, meaning that I simultaneously will hit the limits but I'm not blasting through some insane level of resource usage that costs an order of magnitude more than I'm paying.
I get why they're doing this. I understand that they need to pay the bills. But it could have been done so much better. Split out the expensive AI products from the cheaper search. Tier on features rather than usage limits. Engage with extremely heavy users on a case by case basis if they're generating more real, actual server cost than, say, 3x their subscription payment over a rolling 3-6 month period.
Search is basic infrastructure, and rationing it isn't a savvy decision to ensure financial stability, it's a psychological time bomb. When I saw the headline, I immediately assumed it meant I'd be getting bumped up to a $15 tier - which wouldn't be ideal, but I also wouldn't really have thought about it twice. As it is, I'm realistically only being bumped up to about $12, yet I'm genuinely wound up and irritated by the approach. They're making me think about something that I never previously had to even consider, and think about it in a mildly concerning way, 50+ times a day. That emotional association is absolute kryptonite to a brand.
I'm of the opinion, more and more these days, that complete transparency in costs to run the business is becoming a necessity for me to agree to a subscription plan. For me it's not just weighing the benefits of the service, but also what I determine to be justifiable expenses and, when at that point, profit levels. For example I stopped my Wikipedia donation this year because I disagree with their ever increasing budget and believe they have more than enough money already.
I get that right now, as is typical with early adopters, most are heavy users and they have published (although I don't know how up-to-date it is) their cost-per-search data, but I agree that rate limiting isn't the way to go. Unlimited data, minutes, text are the norm for cell phone plans for a reason (at least in the US) and while none are truly "unlimited" they give it to everyone and rate limit the highest users.
I was already a net-negative for Google (ad blockers, pi-hole, throwaway email address used for search, and more often than not I use a private window for search anyway), obfuscating is trivial at this point, and most of the features Kagi is offering to adjust search is already doable with extensions/scripts. So it's a hard sell to convince me to buy in with them at this rate limited price increase.
Add to it this announcement goes back on their grandfathered in promise. Kagi's claims to privacy is intrinsically linked to their capacity to keep their word. If they say one thing and do another with pricing, how can they be trusted to do what they say when it comes to privacy?
Kagi is, I think, being reasonably transparent about costs; the problem is that their search method is, I think, intentionally unsustainable: until they have their own crawling and indexes, they're aggregating and reorganizing results from search indexes with paid APIs.
But it seems like this ends up being enormously expensive, and doomed to make their costs infeasible unless they can implement their own indexes, because it seems like they're trying to compete by paying their competitors for results, and that seems like it will just result in their competitors raising their API prices: as the post suggests, search indexes are about to become several times more expensive".
Their justifications for the quota choices are problematic, and I'd be happier if they had simply left them out. Even though they do say that their users are not average users, and the average Kagi user is searching 700 times per month, their use of statistics for usage of free search engines to justify quota choices doesn't make sense. A user paying for a service is likely to use it; a free website is likely to have a large number of very infrequent users pulling the average down. I find it very unlikely that someone is going to pay a monthly subscription and then only search three or four times a day.
I've renewed my subscription for a year, in order to keep unlimited searches, as I've been averaging over 1,000 a month. I'm expecting that in a year, Kagi will have likely worked out its business model, or will no longer be in business.
I was looking forward to their family plans to start pushing Kagi in my family home as a viable, no-friction alternative in a way that was not possible with DuckDuckGo, as that required occasionally going back to google when results sucked. I also enjoy Kagi because of the removal of SEO bullshit results that plague every other search engine.
The additional mental load now required is not great. The fact that the larger family plan does nothing but allow more accounts in honestly sucks. Like, you pay 5 bucks more, but you don't actually "get" anything for it. You're still rate-limited to 1000 searches. You get to add more accounts, sure, but as far as I understand, Kagi doesn't actually do personal recommendation in searches, so accounts merely exist to control access, which means that you could honestly pick up the Early Adopter Professional Plan and then just share passwords, if there are no kids in the picture. Or, you can pay 5 bucks more, enjoy unmetered access and then just split the bill with 4 friends. Congratz, here's your 5 bucks a month unmetered access. So aside of the child protection features, I see zero purpose in the family plan, which sucks, cause I love Kagi, but it's not a 10 bucks a month feature.
I'm a dev myself, I understand they have bills to pay, but the 10 bucks are already a steep price and what they really need right now is to break into a bigger market. The casual plan is an interesting start but I think casual people are going to see the 200 search rate limit and be immediately turned off because it's not infinite.
It also isn't great that the early adopter bonus exclusively applies to the 10 dollar plan. I kind of want to reduce to 5 dollars because that's what makes most sense to me, and if I had those 300 extra searches on there too, it'd be lovely and mean I probably never have to pay more than 5 bucks.
I just have a hard time believing a single search costs as much as they say it does. Maybe it's a size issue, and the cost per query will go down as their userbase and infrastructure scale up. But it still seems high to me.
I'm also curious if they actually had enough power users performing more than 700 queries per month to make their old pricing untenable.
I’ve been using Kagi for a while now, so here are my actual usage numbers for the past few months:
Dec 2022: 606
Jan 2023: 554
Feb 2023: 696
I am not a power user in the slightest, but I’m kind of surprised to see my totals this high. I think a lot of that is my own inefficiency in searching. Instead of using bangs (which don’t count to this total), I’ll just type something like “wikipedia mirror’s edge” into search.
I’m also bad about clicking the corrected spelling search link at the top, even when they already corrected my spelling for me. I’ll often fat finger a quick mobile search that’s almost incomprehensible and rely on Kagi to sort out what I mean, which it always does, but I’ll almost invariably click the corrected link anyway, which I’m assuming counts as two searches instead of one.
I would like to drop down to the $5 a month plan, as that “feels” like the right price for what I do (I don’t use any of their AI stuff, for example) and it’s much more affordable for me, but with my current usage that would actually end up being more expensive than staying on the $10 plan.
Not sure what I’m going to do. I might change plans and have to manually tweak my search habits, but I also like the freedom of not having to worry about my search count in the slightest. In general I like Kagi and have been happy with them, but I’ve also thought that the $10 per month I’m paying is pretty steep. I know comparing Kagi’s cost with “free” alternatives is misleading because other services are subsidized by ads and compromise my privacy, but I also don’t feel like I’m a $10 a month kind of user.
It seems like Kagi could intercept easy searches like this, provide them in a cheap way, and make them not count towards the total.
Update: I officially swapped back to DuckDuckGo.
I’m a little sad about it. I really liked my time with Kagi. I signed on in August of last year and planned to just try it out for a month. That one month rolled over into two, then three, and so on. Their search results are seriously good. It made internet search mostly frictionless again for me, which is something I haven’t felt in a long time — probably since the early days of Google.
I still didn’t plan to stay on with Kagi forever though. $10/month was too steep for me long term, but I had hopes their costs would come down over time. They announced that new pricing changes would come in January, so I hung around waiting for those which did end up coming out, albeit two months later (i.e. now).
After this announcement I’ve done a lot of thinking about the changes. Something about the announcement got under my skin, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly. Here are some of those assorted thoughts:
They cite an increase in indexer costs as part of their need for these changes. I’m not super techy, but it seems to me like, as a search company, Kagi should be working on being their own indexer rather than paying out to competitors? Like, isn’t that a top priority for their own autonomy? (Someone here please correct me if I’m wrong/misguided in thinking of this).
They also cite the inclusion of AI as part of their need for these changes. If the per-search cost was already a concern (as it was well before this pricing update), why add another cost on top of that, especially one as significant as AI?
$5/month yielding 200 searches comes out to only six or seven each day. This isn’t enough. It feels almost like decoy pricing: the bad plan that makes the others look better in comparison.
The lack of rollover searches feels… bad. All the messaging is about cost-per-search and paying a certain amount for a certain number, but if I don’t use all of them, they just disappear, and I’ll still be charged extra if I go over next month? I think they made a mistake trying to make the plans so precisely transactional but lacking in reciprocity. If I’m paying for a number of searches and not a flat subscription, then let me have them. I almost feel like a better plan would be to stratify by features and not search counts (e.g. a plan that includes custom domain weighting, one that includes AI, etc.).
This is kind of a minor nitpick, but it also feels like a subtle sidestep where they’re trying not to make things look too transactional: the searches included in the plans are called “free” searches when we are very much paying for them.
I know these points make it look like I’m mad at Kagi, and I am a little bit, but I’m also mad at the situation in general. Assuming I take Kagi at their word and that’s how much searching genuinely does cost, it highlights just how significantly the rest of the search market is subsidized by advertising and personal data. I hate that the options are either pay that way or pay this way.
This has been the general lesson from a lot of my deGoogling: alternatives are expensive.
I have no ill will against Kagi. I do think this pricing setup is a bit of a misfire (even ignoring my complaints above, I think it’s needlessly complicated). Nevertheless, I’d like to see them succeed. Their results were better than what I got elsewhere, and I do think private ad-free services are the future. I hope they do well enough that they’re able to bring their prices down and I eagerly resubscribe. Or maybe being back on DDG will remind me of what I didn’t like about it and make those high Kagi costs look better in comparison.
I worry that they’re in a bit of a bind though. When I made my first post about Kagi, I was surprised to learn that they pull some results from Google. This goes back to my point #1 above, but their dependency on their competitors makes me wary. If their indexers can cause such a big shift in their entire pricing plan by changing what they charge, what’s to say those indexers won’t just do that again, or cut off their access? In evaluating the somewhat sour taste in my mouth, I think it primarily comes down to this: it doesn’t feel right to me to pay that much to a search company if much of what they do is reselling another company’s results. Even if Kagi does a fantastic job of repackaging and presenting those results (and I think they do!), it still feels like they’re standing on very shaky and, at present, very expensive ground.
I've lurked around enough to answer some of your questions:
I've also been priced out and will be switching away from Kagi, probably to StartPage + some userscripts.
Mind mentioning what userscripts? (or if you did them yourself and they aren't public, just mentioning what they do?)
Ah, I haven't written them yet! The feature of Kagi that I use the most is the boost/block domains function, so I'm going to try my hand at importing my blocked domains a la uBlock filters.
Also probably some CSS tweaks.
I've not tried Kagi, but your comments match most of my own thoughts as an outside observer.
It makes sense, but it might be more expensive for them to do so than to simply rent from someone else. Crawling every website, and doing it often enough to have fresh results is likely not easy. You'd need an awfully big pipe. But for a sophisticated search engine you'd also need to hit sites from multiple locations to discover things like automatic redirects (for regional search indexes), determine performance if that's a ranking metric, as well as for discovering cloaking (is the site treating bots differently from humans?).
There's also a lot of servers running automatic bot blocking software, and that often percolates up to networks. Most will let the big crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot through, but if your bot is too much of a nuisance, the server will start refusing to respond.
So that's a tough problem to solve. But of course the real hard part is taking that raw data and determining relevant keywords, link quality, domain authority, social connections, local relevance, and spam signals. Then tying in verticals such as maps, images, or news. Those all likely have their own unique ranking factors that need to be considered in the query.
Oh, and return the results in 32 millisecond.
So it is a tough problem! Many tough problems, actually. I feel for Kagi, and I respect what they're doing. But I don't have that much disposable income, I do a lot of internet searches, and I'm generally satisfied with the incumbents. So it's not for me at this time.
I do extremely similar things, and I'm wondering if all of these trivial or casual searches are why my usage numbers are so high. In addition to having it correct my spelling, I also bet switching from the Web results page to the Image then Video results page and going back counts against me.
I'm not proud to admit it, but since I pretty much always have my browser open my computer, when I need to do some simple math things, I'll usually just enter it into the search bar, have it calculate that, then use that result in the next few calculations. So I definitely need to adjust whatever it is I am doing.
For now, what I did was just pay for the year plan so that I can at least have the Unlimited searches while I figure out how much I am willing to spend.
It should be a matter of pride that you choose the lowest resource intensive option to reach your objective. Intelligence is not about having answers, but finding the answers quickly and easily.
You are not alone! I do the exact same thing.
One time I had a spreadsheet open and alt-tabbed to my browser to run a quick calculation out of habit, and my husband who was watching me nearly lost his mind at my terrible workflow. 😂
I received two emails from Kagi today.
The first email:
The second email:
I don't use Kagi and I'm not going to, but those emails are one of the best responses I have seen from a company.
Still would've liked to see them outline plans to reduce prices in the future.
Right now it looks like they'll continue matching costs and trying to grow, and eventually a small, palatable markup over cost across a large user base will turn profit.
But if costs keep rising?
After seeing you post this (interestingly, I didn't get this e-mail despite being a customer!), I e-mailed Vlad to discuss the AI issue. We're about 9 emails deep at this point, and I don't know that I'm likely to convince him of anything, but we're having a good conversation. I suggest reaching out, he's quite interesting to talk to.
Rather interesting to see a statement like this after Vlad was brushing off complaints in the Kagi discord by saying that new people even signed up when users complained about the pricing changes and worried that people will abandon the service.
It's still a good response, even though it gives me a sad satisfaction. I prepaid for a year of Kagi on the old plan, and I'll see where they'll be then. If not I'll probably have to mirror your action and return to DDG.
Going forward, it looks like for unlimited searches, Kagi offers a $25/month plan. This is quite a bump from the previous $10/month plan. Does anyone know of any other alternatives? I've heard Neeva and SearX recommended but please share your experience if you've used either!
I signed up for a free Neeva account to try it out.
They recommended I install their browser on iOS, which is billed as “100% ad-free and private”.
If you scroll down to the app’s privacy report card, there’s a ton of stuff under the “Data Linked to You” category including location, contact info, and, ironically, search history.
That was enough to get me to rule out Neeva.
While I’m not super happy about Kagi’s price change, at least their browser has a squeaky clean privacy record.
Aww, that's a bummer. I really liked their LLM summarization for search results. Seems a bit of a hit-or-miss but this privacy issue is much more glaring... Thanks for the heads-up! Do post an update if you end up switching to a different search engine from Kagi!
I’m going to switch back to DuckDuckGo.
I think their results are a lot worse than Kagi’s, but $10 a month is too steep for me for the long term, especially if I have to be worried about going over a limit.
I considered trying Startpage, but it looks like there isn’t a way to make it the default search on iOS, which is where maybe 70% of my searches come from.
I've used Hyperweb on my iPad to change my search engine to a custom one. I think it should support any search engine since it uses a query string and replaces part of it with your input!
I've been using a self-hosted SearXNG instance for about a year or so now, with the DDG and Google backends enabled for general search. The quality is pretty good, very similar to Kagi for programming-oriented searches. My main complaint is that the engines sometimes take measures to block result scraping, so specific backends can break for a while until someone fixes it.
Kagi almost had me, as I had paid for a month to try it out the last time DDG results stopped working, and was just about ready to pull the trigger on switching to an annual plan, but then these pricing updates were announced and they lost me. It was already a tough sell at $10/mo for unlimited, but occasionally losing my DDG results in SearXNG for a few days feels less annoying than constantly worrying about how many "free" searches I have left.
I've cancelled my Kagi subscription and sent Vlad a short e-mail explaining why. Very sad but I really don't want to subsidize AI nonsense.
AI is not the reason Kagi got more expensive though.
Nonetheless, I'm doing my best not to support companies that are funding and promoting, specifically, generative models trained indiscriminately on copyrighted content.
As a standalone tool, I found the summarizer useful for getting a quick summary of YouTube videos I don't want to watch. (I have a policy of not watching anything other than music videos on YouTube.)
So I think there are uses for summarizers, but they might be somewhat specialized.
I just went through and counted my google usage for the last week and found that I searched 88, 46, 72, and 53 times Monday to Thursday this week. I thought that my weekend usage might be lower because I work on a computer for most of the day at work, which seems to be true sometimes. My searches per day on the weekend were 58 and 9. Assuming that this is an average week, that comes out to over 1500 searches/month.
While I do think that I get $25/month in value from the searches that I made and the results that come along with them, I can't help but think they are flighting an impossible uphill batter against Google and the rest of the free engines. If I was to be paying for a search service, I would want that to be my primary, go to engine for making searches and if I was unable to find what I wanted there I would move on to a different engine. I cannot imagine that I would have a good end user experience worrying about whether I would hit my cap all month.
Interestingly, not that I would ever want to have to think about this on a consistent basis while searching for things, as long as you are making less than 1700 searches a month it makes sense to get the Professional Tier and pay per search vs getting unlimited.
Related to my other comment: Kagi is not listed on PrivacyTools, is it because they're not free? StartPage is on there despite the information @wervenyt shared here (being acquired by a data company).
Any thoughts on this from anyone? I usually trust PrivacyTools recommendations.
PrivacyTools was replaced by Privacy Guides, see this post for details.
I would imagine it's because they're new (only been around a little over a year) more than anything.
As an aside, though, PrivacyTools seems quite bought out. The top four out of five recommended VPNs are advertisements, really? I guess that should tell you something about Mullvad managing to stay on there...
Sure, but that doesn't mean they aren't valid high quality options. I'm pretty sure Nord and Mullvad have been there for along time, and same with ProtonMail and that company.
https://www.privacytools.io/donate#finances
I can't say I agree. I think regular old advertising is evil enough already, and any company that would stoop to bribes to increase their ranking is not to be trusted with a total record of what you do on the internet.
I think 2 main reasons: Kagi is relatively new, and it is relatively small.
I'm not involved but to make some guesses.
As far as I know, PrivacyTools was originally (maybe still is) an open?, crowd-sourced, community-oriented project that started on Reddit. It quickly gained a community with other users joining the project. Their GitHub page was originally https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io but was archived on June 24, 2022. It is somewhere at this point, maybe a few months before, when a group broke off to become Privacy Guides, and the two groups have a sort of beef between them.
I am unable to find if there is a public changelog, or a page with all of the PrivacyTools site changes and their dates other than that it is on v19.84 secure. I do believe that in order for a tool/site to be listed however, that it should match their criteria and also be suggested on this other site, so maybe Kagi was never suggested.
Before June 2022, Kagi was in closed beta and the only way to get access was to sign-up and wait to recieve an email invitation. I had only heard of it because a user here on Tildes recommended it. Kagi was, and still is relatively new and small in comparison to other search engines based on popularity. On A look at search engines with their own indexes - Seirdy it is listed as one of the smaller "Semi-independent indexes" that falls back to Google-Bing-Yandex (GBY) when attempting to find results. To my knowledge, Kagi had always had a free tier but with a limited number of searches.
So I’ve been a user of kagi and orion since early closed beta. I don’t use it often, because it has produced very inconsistent results for me. It’s primary output value is excluding clickbait/seo results, which have been variable.
Then there’s the privacy value, which is important. And also the introduction and pursuit of the notion that producers ought to get paid decently, and I ought to provide a reasonable fee for services that are valuable to me.
That said, there is no information about that piece. It must be rolled into the reported costs per search. But how does that coat break down?
Also mildly concerning to me is, who is Vlad? He claims to be funding startup out of pocket to the tune of many millions of dollars. Who is this guy, that he has so much cash to burn?
Waaaay back in the day, decent search engines were funded by university departments. The costs can’t have been that exorbitant. Google came along and was way amazing better it seemed (especially for ultra minimalist interface), but yahoo, altavista, and webcrawler held their own on actual results. Were their costs per search the same?
https://kagi.ai/about.html
As for costs waaaaaaaay back in the day, that's a really bad comparison. The web is orders of magnitude larger now than it was then and still growing exponentially. You mention google... well speaking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers
The customer base is completely incomparable though. Kagi sent emails after a couple hundred customers left. Google serves much of Earth.
Also, computers have advanced too.
The customer base isn't comparable, but the expectation for quality results by Kagi's customers is similar, if not higher. Crawlers are relatively cheap to operate, anyone can do it... but quality indexing requires immense computing power and storage space.
But, as far as I understand it, part of the reason Kagi is so expensive per search is because they actually don't do their own crawling or indexing. They pay for access to google and bing's indexes via their commercial APIs (which are expensive), and then have to pay for additional compute time to further refine and filter the results they get from those.
Does anyone use Startpage? To me it seems like the ideal choice: based on Google, which generally gives great results, but privacy oriented, anonymized and I don't see any ads, and, of course, free.
I get that Kagi has some extra features, but I don't see it worth paying 10 bucks for.
I used to use Startpage and still will as a backup, but their acquisition in 2019 by System1, a big data company, has led me to write it off.
Follow up from Privacy Guides where they approve StartPage:
I use Startpage. I didn't know about Kagi, to be honest. I started with DuckDuckGo and have been using Startpage for the last year or so, now.