Kagi Introducing Fair Pricing
Better search results with no ads. Welcome to Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid search engine that gives power back to the user.
In months where you don't utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account for that month. This credit will be applied to your next billing cycle, effectively covering your subsequent month's subscription at no additional cost.
SearXNG ftw ! Also , who the heck stop using an entire month a search engine. Maybe in very isolated cases like vacations, or medic leaves, but come on...
Which instance do you use? Or do you selfhost it? It has been hit and miss for me. Not sure if I’m doing it wrong
I started using it on instances, like other WebApps example invidious, but instances get constantly banned and sometimes you can't use them or rely on them. So yes I selfhosted it. You don't need any special hardware. Docker is very simple to use . I even went further and used an old laptop as server with Linux , installed tailscale everywhere and using it's feature FUNNEL (or SERVE if you don't want to expose to internet) got my own domain , with certs, with reverse proxy in one shot. It's a f miracle . Tailscale has full documentation and step by steps guides. I just followed those. If you want to make it even simpler, install proxmox and use containers . They are like tiny Linuxes with their own Mac, IP , etc
searx.perennialte.ch has been great.
It was okay while I was using it. Just a bit pricey. But I stopped using it when they started the whole "EUs GDPR doesn't apply to us" non-sense. Simply not a company I can trust to handle personal data properly.
I also liked the part where they decided they don't need to pay the VAT.
This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?
As a paying member, I know that they started charging (and presumably transferring) VAT last year.
Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
I looked it up and there appears to be an exception for such cases where VAT is charged in the company's jurisdiction rather that the customer's (it's usually the other way around) until you reach 10000€ annual turnover. Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.
I must have missed that, can you explain what you mean by that?
This old blog post summarises a lot of pain points: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Similar to Brave (and more recently Proton) I simply can't trust them, despite liking the idea of their respective services.
The real fair pricing would've been to only charge for the credits you actually use.
They tried various pricing plans although I forget if they experimented with both usage based and capped plans. Anything other than unlimited did not go over well with users. I had no desire to manage a monthly cap since my own daily usage varied so much. People had also become very conditioned to having unlimited search.
On the one hand yes but on the other hand this would also kind of set wrong incentives: to use Kagi search less because you'd need to pay more.
That's not an incentive they or you would want.
I think what I'd like is how my mobile carrier handles their data limits: It's not an entirely fair comparison because in that case, contrary to Kagi, there is no real cost associated with my degree of usage of the service, making them entirely arbitrary and unnecessary but besides that the unused data rolls over to the next month and that's something Kagi could mirror.
I hover around 600-1000 searches per month but sometimes exceed 1000. If I could pay for 1000/month and accumulate a little buffer in the months where I search less, that would work for me. Though perhaps I'd still want to just simply pay for unlimited usage for peace of mind.
"This is to replace our previous unfair pricing."
That’s a brilliant idea to keep reporting users who abandoned the service as active users.
I wish they'd offer an llm free version with no cap on searches. Their products are too expensive and it feels like it is mostly to pay for the llms. I can’t justify paying that much for a product I am never going to use.
They do. The $10/month search plan is unlimited.
The only LLM stuff in their search product is the quick answers which can be turned off and page summaries which you have to explicitly click on in a submenu in any case.
As someone aware of how limited LLMs are, I've actually found both of these features to be useful for gauging whether a site is worth visiting or not at times which is part of the core feature set of a search engine IMHO.
A good while back they claimed that Google search index fees make up the vast majority of their costs, so I doubt any of your money is going towards LLM BS unless you actually pay for their assistant product.
I doubt Google has given them any discounts since then.
I'd expect the development of all of their product to be mostly funded by VC. If they can get VC idiots who fell for the """AI""" hype to subsidise building an actually useful thing (the search product), that's a win in my book, even if they also have to build the AI crap on the side to keep said VC idiots happy.
Yeah I love those Kagi features, use them all the time.
Actually they have no VC in the traditional sense! They did private investment rounds, and I think they raised like 400k from like 60 investors or something. The actual numbers might be off, but I remember looking into this and it was lime 10/20k per investor on average, basically retail amounts.
After nearly a year of Kagi. It's actually painful when I'm on a device with just Google.
Would recommend if you are a knowledge worker or researcher, or just in a technical field.
Makes me wonder how many people are subscribed to Kagi without using it. Then why would you have a subscription in the first place?
Seems such a weird edge case to me. If I pay for a search engine you can rely on me using it as my primary search engine. And I search the Internet daily, and certainly monthly. So this change wouldn't help me at all
This is a really big question! Let's wait patiently for them to answer it.
This must've been a lot more complicated to implement than to allow us to NOT SEND OUR SUBSCRIPTION MONEY TO RUSSIA.
sigh
I've been searching for an alternative search engine. Found Searx to be subpar.
Was thinking about Kagi, but if they work with the russians, that's an immediate no go for me.
Are you referring to using Yandex?
I think they did explain that implementing turn off and on of specific engines per user is a complete rewrite of their querying system, so it is an expensive and complex change.
Removing yandex is OTOH not a great move as results in Russian language often come from there. Also morally I would generally agree, but then - especially now - you could argue about "giving money to US companies", and that means they need to shut down, they can't use bing, google, yandex.
They specifically avoid sanctions by routing payments through Kazakhstan, and tried to claim Yandex wasn't even a russian company when called out.
And no, the US is not the same. You might not have hosted Ukrainian refugees or be in full understanding of what's happening there but any money going into Russia is right now used for torture, rape and killing of Ukrainians.
I had a Kagi family subscription and immediately cancelled when I learnt about Vlad's "it's just some geopolitical opinions" stance. I also know others have done the same.
Wait what? They did?
I just discovered they existed today so I'm pretty out of the loop on that topic.
I need per search pricing. Their plan includes way too many searches and is way too expensive. I use it like 2-3 times a month.
Do you use any other search engine?
We have implemented this for the simple reason of being kind to our users
Eh, ok. This is a good user retention strategy if your product isn't interesting enough to use for most users. Can you imagine any other product offering a free month if you didn't use it for a whole month? Kagi is near death.
edit: downvoters have six-to-eight figure salaries at Kagi
edit 2: Kagi sent out an email to its 15 staff to downvote my comment on its grassroots marketing plot
I pay for kagi because it's genuinely less frustrating to use than searxng, duckduckgo, bing, and whatever shit Google is up to these days.
They're fine search engines but after years of using them I found they annoyed me sometimes; their limitations will surface if you use them long enough. In contrast, I haven't ran into a kagi search results page yet that has annoyed me by not finding what I expected to see.
The problem is that Google was good for a long time and then that became the bar everything is measured against. None of the free ones I tried came as close to that Google-like search from the before times as this paid service does.
The user growth has been bigger than usual in the last months, they have live stats. Not to say they were breaking even at around 25k users, they now have 38k.
Also their product shouldn't be interesting, should be invisible. It's a search engine, not a toy.
If you really want to see malice, I would say it's more of a marketing move because very very few users will not make any search at all in a month. And those users have indeed no cost for them. Giving them credit still means you are getting the money eventually.
FWIW - most mobile data plans roll over if you don't use them fully during the month.
(at least where I live)