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.
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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.
And yet I had to pay $12.10 for my $10 Kagi subscription...
From how I understand it, VAT only applies from a certain amount of revenue, so they didn't have to pay it before but do now. Could be wrong though
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.
This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?
Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
How is this FUD when you just said they admitted to it?
Exemptions vary by country, but often they only apply to small businesses.
Often there's no right to any exemptions anyway if your company isn't headquartered in the country (and Kagi is from USA).
Either way you only have to pay VAT on transactions made after you go over the limit, while Kagi admitted they have to settle unpaid taxes.
This situation can only happen if they didn't pay the taxes they already legally owed.
See: https://kagifeedback.org/d/3592-march-19th-2024-introducing-sales-taxes
Kagi will have to retroactively pay for all sales tax/VAT that we did not collect in the last almost two years. We have chosen to absorb this on behalf of our customers.
They tried to make themselves look like the good guys, while in reality they just paid back their overdue taxes they were required to collect all this time.
Not knowing the tax rules is not an excuse.
If they wanna do business internationally they can afford to hire an accountant.
Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.
It's not "extremely intransparent", it's just a little complicated.
And accountants are really cheap for small businesses.
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.
Isn't this just the path of an immature company?
There's a guy who is probably a programmer and he makes a thing, starts trying to sell it. Nothing here stands out as bad intentions, it just makes me think of what it might look like if I tried to start a company (a lot of stumbling).
Plus the blog post is pretty clear it's their personal views. They spend a lot of time talking about the AI crap but when using Kagi it seems less intrusive than Google, and you can turn it off.
I dunno, I've seen this blog posted around a few times and there isn't anything in here that puts me off so long as I treat it as what it is, a subscription for that month, not an investment in the future. If the company goes bankrupt because the CEO spent investors' money starting a t-shirt company then I'll just use a different search when they shut down.
Probably worth noting I use a relay email address not my main one, but I do that for almost everything.
Excellent read, thanks!
After reading that essay I feel a lot more queasy about using Kagi. It's just that I really despise ads, but I'm willing to put up with it, if the search engine company is more ethical. For the moment I've downgraded my account from 10 to 5 bucks a month. I wasn't using any of the AI features anyway.