Exactly, the same way 3G became unusable for internet anytime your phone reverted to it, even thought at as a protocol it is perfectly appropriate for things like loading basic websites. Throttled 3G makes 4G look amazing. Rinse and repeat for 5G.
It's even worse that if you try to add bob#1234 and he doesn't exist because it's Bob the error message you get doesn't remind you usernames are case sensitive.
So don't play the game. Personally I want kernel level anticheats because they make it much harder to cheat in the game. I want to know that my opponents are not cheaters. That's something I don't have in CS:GO, a game ripe with cheaters, or TF2, a game ripe with bots. (Valve's usermode anticheat is absolutely useless)
Yet it's still pretty dang easy to bypass VGK and cheat in Valorant if you even slightly know what you're doing. Now you have the worst of both worlds. In theory, Valve's VACnet and Trust Factor are the ideal solutions, but in practice... not so much.
Make every player pay a deposit which is confiscated when they get caught cheating. Make servers with different deposit levels, so that people who really care about cheating pay over $1000 for example.
Better than having keys which I cannot control on my computer. And I don't play games anyway.
Or allow people running their own gaming servers that they can moderate. Solves cheating problem and when gaming company stops supporting their online game or goes out of business.
I'll never get tired of saying it: politicians are the same as the citizens that vote them in. In India they won't vote out corrupt politicians because the citizenry is corrupt itself.
Give the country and its democracy some credit (Indian here).
We’ve voted out charismatic leaders, we’ve voted in huge coalitions, we’ve ignored sympathy waves after political assassinations, power transfers have been uniformly peaceful since we gained independence.
If this cultural/endemic corruption at work, I think most people in most countries would prefer this to whatever oligarchy, junta, theocracy, ruler-for-life-god-on-earth-ocrasy they suffer under.
Sure, blame the corruption on the people; It certainly has nothing to do with a system based on extortion, with no incentives to perform the functions it was allegedly established for, and every incentive to extract as much revenue from the citizenry as possible without a rebellion.
I knew Kagi is paid but I didn't know they had a limit on how many searches you can perform, which is also rather low. But what I really didn't like is how dishonest they are. The lowest tier costs $5 and includes 200 searches per month. That is 6.66 per day! But they say "Includes enough searches for 99% of internet users" because "The average person searches Google three or four times per day". They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.
FWIW I've been using Kagi exclusively since Nov 2022, and here's what my monthly usage looks like:
Apr 2023 - 895
Mar 2023 - 1047
Feb 2023 - 650
Jan 2023 - 603
Dec 2022 - 1367
Trends much higher when I screw something up on my network!
I have been asking GPT-* a lot of what I would have previously searched for. And there's still a lot of searching `+reddit.com` because they can't seem to solve search.
I pay $10/mo and am grandfathered in as an "early adopter" with 1K searches. I would be willing to pay more because I've been so happy with it. It's simple stuff -- it respects and obeys my double quotes and boolean operators. If my query returns no results, I get no results. No advertisements, period. The ability to pin, raise, lower, or eliminate the rank of domains in your results.
It's just nice to feel a modicum of respect as someone who's been using computers since shortly after they could read.
Yeah. It's just sad that it was what search was, for free, before. This idea that you search for things, and you find them, instead of paid per word shitty articles and ads. Nutty concept in 2023.
At this point, the free options are so bad I'm considering writing my own. It won't do 50% of what the big ones do but it will do it well.
Yea i hate this framing. Nothing is free and we should be wanting to move towards payment ourselves. Yea, i'd prefer "payment" to be the cost of locally running a server, but i'll take what i can get.
The days of believing free is viable for any online service should be long gone. Hell it's difficult to even determine if paying for a service actually protects you from being the product - because often that isn't the case. However free should be a no-brainer these days. There is no free.
Apparently I've been using Kagi a year longer than that but I can't work out how to find my stats though. I signed up to the Team plan for my company as soon as I saw it was available - before Kagi I couldn't imagine paying for search, now though, I couldn't live without it. It's impossible to overstate how useful a functioning search turns out to be.
I started using Kagi exclusively around the same time, I'm almost exactly on the same boat as you. Interesting to see that even though you seem to have a bit more variance than I do we land around the same range of searches/month:
Apr 2023 651
Mar 2023 708
Feb 2023 613
Jan 2023 611
Dec 2022 759
You are correct in saying that almost all current Kagi users are in the other 1% category (tech savvy professionals who search a lot).
But this plan is not meant for then. This plan is literally made for the 99% of all users who search the web 2-3 times a day, as the statistics show. We would like Kagi to have much broader adoption outside the HN crowd, and a low price plan is essential.
How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?
> How would you change the wording to make this clearer in a way that does not strike you as dishonest?
I don't necessarily agree it's dishonest, but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.
As you said, almost all Kagi users are not in this 99% of users. Having a plan that caters to these users probably doesn't benefit many people in that group because they won't pay for search, but for users who would pay for search they might see that tier and feel that the quotas are stingy and they're being forced up the pricing tiers for behaviour that to them feels normal.
I don't know what your subscriber base looks like, but as an armchair spectator... I'd probably drop the $5/m tier and then emphasise that the "Professional" tier comes with "10x the number of searches that an average internet user makes", or whatever the multiplier actually is.
Also it would probably go some way towards assuaging fears of running out of searches if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.
> but I think it's a bit weird to have a pricing tier than effectively doesn't work for anyone who would pay for the service.
When we had only the $10 plan, we were getting messages from users that that plan is too pricey for them when they don't search as much.
Hence the $5 month and now about 5% of our users are on this plan. (and Kagi still has zero marketing spend). You have to start somewhere. This gives us an opportunity to onboard almost everyone to Kagi.
> if unused searches rolled over month to month. This tends to feel fairer in general.
Yes, except something still has to pay for all the free trial searches and our salaries. Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.
> Yes, except something still has to pay for all the free trial searches and our salaries. Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.
Sidenote, i'd really enjoy the rollover. At least to some degree. Not infinitely of course, but being able to mitigate the cost of some overages would be really nice.
Aside from that i'm a new customer (1st month), having gone through the trial and now on the $5/m plan. I'm quite happy. I expect i'll upgrade to the $10/m, but i hope i don't have to upgrade to the $20/m because i'll be debating if it's worth it. Regardless, a bit of a rollover price would help a ton with any cost aversion. Even if only up to 1 extra month, or w/e, of rollover. Anything would help.
Thanks for Kagi tho, i'm very happy so far! I also really love the continued work and improvements. It feels like i'm not just paying for the current product, but buying into a larger future product. Which also goes to mitigate cost aversion.
I don't know your unit economics (but they sound fascinating), but generally free trials are considered a marketing expense and would be worked into the CAC (customer acquisition cost). Then you can trade-off CAC with lifetime value (LTV) and a target payback period – i.e. the break-even period.
Let's say a search costs 1c, the free plan therefore costs $1. With a 5% 30d conversion rate that's a $20 CAC. On $10/m for 700 searches, that's just under 7 months to pay back which is quite long, but drops to just over 3 months if users average ~400 searches, so I can see why you don't want to roll over.
That said, if you believe you have a big LTV/long retention, retained users past their payback period should be more than enough to pay salaries/R&D/etc, so maybe there is more flexibility.
> Selling product at cost or below is something VC funded startups can do, which we are not.
I know it often feels like this, but I think the answer is more complicated. It's often hard to know what cost actually is – when you're hiring, growing, and selling a service running on tech that is hard to price.
I'm interested in how you know your cost per search at such a level of precision. It suggests to me that either you've done _way more_ work measuring it and optimising your infrastructure than I expect for a company of Kagi's age, or that it's a fairly naive number (understandably so!) based on dividing infra cost by number of searches. If it's the latter, are there economies of scale that significantly change the number if you have, say, 10x or 100x the user base?
The answer to the questions is long, nuanced and interactive. I'd be open to explaining it in a more interactive environment, for example our Discord server. kagi.com/discord - feel free to ping me there @VladP
Don't change anything. Your marketing is just fine. The commenter you're responding to is just voicing their surprise at discovering that most people don't actually use the internet as much as they do, or they're realizing they don't user it as much as they thought they did month over month, and, either way, consequently feeling insecure. They don't understand the difference between current user base and target market. You don't market to your current user base. You market to your target demographic. Like you said, if Kagi wants to attract average internet users, then having a plan that suites them is pretty important and in no way dishonest. I experience the same knee-jerk reaction when reviewing your recent pricing plan changes/updates. Then I thought about it for two seconds and obviously understood.
I currently subscribe to the $5 plan, and I'm happy with that.
Most searches I do are simple, any search engine will do. So I don't use Kagi for those. When it's not trivial, I just start my search with "k " to use Kagi. I easily stay below the 200 searches limit then.
For sure it would be more convenient to have unlimited searches, but I'm not willing to pay for a higher plan.
Having a low entry is very important to get new users on board. But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway). This makes the standard plan absolutely unattractive even for non-tech-savvy professionals. But the professional plan also only offers 700 searches for $10.
Personally, I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches. Otherwise I don't know if I can judge $10 per month for a premium search engine whose service will not even last me for a whole month.
Don't get me wrong. I love the product and would be happy to pay for it, but your current pricing plans are just not very convincing to me and do not fit most peoples needs. Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.
> But the included searches of 200 in the standard plan is extremely low. Even a normal user will hit this limit quickly
They will not, a 'normal' user searches only 100 times a month.
> (if not, they are not your target group - or why should they consider paying for a search engine anyway
Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.
> I think Kagi needs to reconsider their pricing plans and either lower the monthly price or significantly raise the limit for included searches
We will. Pricing is not a matter of our mood though, but of economics, and once you remove advertisers from the equation the true cost of search surfaces. We were able to bring it down to just 1.5 cents per search.
> Nowadays, a search engine is something you use on a daily basis. And you don't want to care about it.
Isn't something you use every day, tens if not hundreds times a day, and helps you accomplish important stuff, in a more productive way worth the $25/mo then?
> Because they want higher quality search experience, have their privacy respected and/or do not like the entire order of things on the web where they are constantly being the product.
I really wish it would be that way. But from my personal experience non-tech affine people don’t care about privacy or ads that much (as long as it’s free). Just take my wife and father-in-law as an example: They have Google as their startpage in the browser. And instead of directly typing the URL into the browser bar, they will always do a search for it. I told them so many times, but they literally don’t care.
And they are not completely wrong since it works for them. 99% of the time Google will return what they are looking for within the first result. No chance I can convince them to suddenly pay $5-10 for the same thing.
I'm currently in Early Adopter ($10) plan. If I move to $5 tier plan and move back to $10 plan in the future, which plan would I be at that time? Is it still Early Adopter?
BTW, I'm a happy Kagi early adopter currently subscribed at $10/mo. I do have concerns about even my limit, though. After I switched all my browsers (on all my devices) to use Kagi as the default search engine, I regularly exceed 1k searches per month.
I'm very curious how you measure the "average" user's usage. It seems hard for me to believe that even an "average" user (which I grant I am not) who has switched their browsers' default search engine to Kagi on their (one) computer and (one) phone -- assuming an average user has a computer and a smartphone -- uses less than 200 queries per month.
We've all been trained for years now (by Google) to type searches (not urls) into our browser's address bar. For so many people, the first action they take to "access the web" is to type something that is not a URL in their browser's address bar. I suspect this behavior is even _more common_ among "average" users ("power" users seem more likely to actually type "mail.google.com" instead of "gmail", for example).
Yes potentially, we found out that incorporating billing system is painful and takes away resources from our (small) team that we'd rather spend on building better search experience (like this update).
~7 per day is on the low side for me. I will normally rerun the same search with different terms multiple times, especially if I'm looking for an answer to something highly technical, like easily 5-6 different searches for the same thing. And this happens multiple times per day.
There's something perverse with the incentives here: they make more money if you have to perform more searches.
It doesn't quite sit right in the same way github actions charges per minute: The slower their runners are, the more money they make.
And both of these scenarios there is no user agency to assist with that past a certain point.
> they make more money if you have to perform more searches.
I believe the reason for the pricing is Kagi's cost structure. Accessing for example Google index is not free. Since they don't show ads or monetize the user in other ways, they need to pass the costs to customers.
Pay-for-what-you-use models are not common for consumer services, but I think it is a healthy pricing model. Better than fixed price packages, where you assume 80% of low volume users will cover the costs for the 20% heavy users
It’s tricky because there are subtle psychological effects when marginal use directly incurs marginal cost. It makes each use a decision.
When you assemble tools for cognitive work, it’s important that they have low overhead. Thinking about the financial cost of using a tool is a small context switch that slows you down. Thus a bundle of prepaid stuff increases the utility of the service beyond what you’d get with pure pay per use, even though the latter is more economically efficient.
> they make more money if you have to perform more searches.
Their model pushes people who make a large # of searches towards the unlimited plan, where incentives are always aligned. I personally find that fair because I expect to get at least as much value from my search engine as I do from my IDE. $20/month seems reasonable.
Their model also allows them to have lower expenses against the lower tier plans if users of those plans make fewer searches than their quota. That's the incentive you're looking for. As long as users are not reaching their quotas, or are on unlimited plans, the user incentive is aligned with the business' incentives. And shortly after exceeding their quotas, users will probably upgrade their plan.
The perverse incentive only exists within a few "holes" between the plans, and serves to encourage the user to upgrade. I believe that by limiting the window of the perverse incentive, it should discourage goal-seeking to fit customers within that window. The more optimal outcome month-to-month should likely be to improve customer experience and get more signups, rather than juicing the current customers for limited additional gains inside those constrained windows.
It's completely honest. You don't have a sense of typical use. I'd argue search power users make fewer searches a day, too, but like you, and unlike Kagi, I can't back that up with sources.
I was vaguely aware of Kagi from their posts here in the past and thought it sounded interesting but hadn't bothered trying it out as I'm fairly happy with DDG.
I just gave it a quick try there. While some of the features seem promising, the website ranking for example, what they consider a search doesn't feel great from a user perspective. Each step below resulted in part of my quota being used up:
1. Making the initial search.
2. Switching to image results.
3. Waiting a few minutes before switching back to the web results.
4. Viewing page 2 of the web results.
5. Ordering results by time.
6. Changing the sort order to descending. The previous step executed another search without allowing me to modify this.
7. Limiting the search to results from the past 24 hours. This returns a totally different set of results from when we merely sorted by most recent.
8. (Sometimes) Clearing the filters.
9. Opening the Lens > Edit menu, which has a big cross at the top right making it look like an overlay. Instead, it actually sends a GET request for the search again, using up your quota if you've exceeded whatever the grace period is.
This, along with nearly tripling the price for existing subscribers that want the same functionality does not inspire confidence or goodwill. The change might've been more palatable if they'd kept a single subscription and put a monthly price cap on additional search fees to match the $25 unlimited tier.
Maybe I'm not the target user but the 100 lifetime trial searches just means I probably won't return once I've ran out. 25/100 are already gone to evaluating what they charge for and I don't think I'll get a good idea of whether they're actually providing value over existing providers with the remaining 75. The amount charged isn't low enough that it's not a decision.
The main justification for all this seems to be that adding AI to the search experience is expensive. The obvious rebuttal is that if AI is such a big value-add why don't they just charge for that service in a higher tier or as an add-on.
The first 8 sound about right, (9 is probably a bug) and all of them perform a new search which costs us about 1.5 cents to do. There are only three ways for the cost of that search to be paid today:
- Advertisers paying it for you
- VC money paying it for you
- User pays for it
Kagi is built for people who want a search engine built for them. There is no way around it but to pay for search like you would pay for donuts you eat in a coffee shop.
AI is no justification, search is just expensive. Google is making about 4 cents worth for every user search. We are selling search at 1.5 cents while building a completely user-centric product. If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.
Most of the above examples of unnecessary searches could be avoided if the UI was designed to help the user avoid unnecessary searches instead of somewhat cloning Google's UX, which is designed around searches being effectively free for them.
Very much this. Probably 75% of my searches are “Just looking something up on Wikipedia” or “Just looking something up on StackOverflow”. If Kagi were to let me search these sites without the cost of a full Google lookup, its plan would work for me once again and I’d return to being a customer.
In the interests of fairness, they do support, and do not charge for, "bangs" that defer the search to that site. They even support creating your own custom ones which is really nice. Wikipedia is one of the default ones. According to their docs you can search it with "w! query", "!w query", "query w!", "query !w" or even add the bang to a "quick" list and use something like "w query".
Unfortunately, you do give up consistency and whatever filtering/ranking/customisation Kagi offer.
I appreciate the response and I'd like to reiterate that I might just not be the right user with the right expectations. Still, I hope it's useful to hear why someone might be on the fence about the product.
> (9 is probably a bug)
To clarify 9, the request is sent when clicking the cross on the Lens > Edit page rather on than visiting it. This also occurs when returning from maps. In both cases a new search is only billed when the cache has expired. Interestingly, from a totally naive user's perspective, maps don't appear to use up a search.
> If you know of other ways to do this, we are all ears.
I don't have an issue with charging for individual searches. On the whole I think it's a reasonable idea. I do think that some aspects of the UX encourage billing superfluous searches and that, on a purely financial level, Kagi is dis-incentivised from improving this.
Taking steps 5 and 6 as an example: there's no reason for these to be separate billable events. When viewing search results the user interface simply doesn't allow the user to select the sort order in the same operation they select the field. I sincerely doubt that this is intentional but it's easy to see the cynical take.
I think there's also a decent case for longer caching of results, giving users the option to refresh results if it's important they aren't stale. This avoids the current situation where a user might spend some time visiting the firsts webpage in the result set, return wishing to continue perusing subsequent results but end up triggering a billable event. The same applies should someone want to swap between web and images.
A quirk I noticed when trying to trigger shopping results was that searching for "best hair dryer" will display the shopping widget whereas searching "best hairdryer" does not, despite "showing results for best hair dryer" appearing as part of the search.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the feature but searching for variations on "cordless drill", "best cordless drill", "best cordless combi drill", "best cordless percussion drill" never returned any shopping results, should I have expected it to?
To expand on my prior point as to why moving to a total number of trial searches might be harmful to conversions. In evaluating the billing rules and shopping results, I'm now on search 46/100. I haven't yet got into a flow with the product. That might change over the next 50 searches but I still haven't explored: redirects, lenses, personalised results, fine tuning search settings, or just the broader search quality.
> I do think that some aspects of the UX encourage billing superfluous searches and that, on a purely financial level, Kagi is dis-incentivised from improving this.
Kagi is selling searches at cost, and we make money on subscriptions. Making a suboptimal UX id definitely not what we are doing, as people pay us for UX to be optimal.
You point out some valid use-cases there and the reason we haven't addressed them so far is probably because they are rare and users didn't care enough to post and upvote them on kagifeedback.org for it to make a difference.
> Hanlon's razor in general applies well when thinking about Kagi, expect it is not (always) stupidity but lack of resources.
Please don't feel that I was making any hard judgements about Kagi or yourself based on the points I mentioned. My only intention has been to learn a bit more about the product and provide some insight into what someone evaluating the product for the first time might feel. I appreciate that the points may come across as hostile/challenging but I'd be happiest if they were rebutted easily.
Your present response does raise some concerns however.
> Kagi is selling searches at cost
This is a different claim from your blog post on 08/03/23 where the cost of each search was 1.25 cents. If this isn't the case, you're losing money on any annual unlimited subscribers that make more than 1,416 searches each month.
> and we make money on subscriptions
If this is the case, why not differentiate the subscriptions based on their value-add features and operate an upper bound of $25/mo on the amount charged for searches for all tiers?
If you're making money off of the subscription, why don't the search quotas roll over?
Together, these three points give the impression that the aim is for subscription search quotas to be under-utilised rather than to provide the searches at cost.
> You point out some valid use-cases there and the reason we haven't addressed them so far is probably because they are rare and users didn't care enough to post and upvote them on kagifeedback.org for it to make a difference.
That's a fair point regarding general feedback. I can't speak as your average user but as someone that wasn't already invested in the product they were areas that introduced friction in the decision of whether I'd like to pay for the product or not. A user evaluating the product is unlikely to post why they haven't converted to kagifeedback.org, even if they're aware of the site. It's worth bearing in mind that issues for potential users may not be a problem for existing users, apportioning time to the desires of both groups is a difficult balance.
> and is planned on our roadmap, just not prioritized (just one upvote) and we had bigger fish to fry.
My personal perspective is that it's absolutely unacceptable for a company to double-charge due to their own UI decisions. Spurious billing in general is something I would expect to be treated as top priority on an ongoing basis. Treating it's occurrence as a feature request raises serious concerns, especially regarding how similar/more impactful situations might be handled.
I'm disappointed, there's a lot to like about the product itself.
> This is a different claim from your blog post on 08/03/23 where the cost of each search was 1.25 cents.
Yes, cost of search has significantly increased since. Microsoft raised prices 6x and it is 2.5 cents to do a search with the Bing API alone. We are trying to absorb much of that through creative ways so that users do not see it.
> If this is the case, why not differentiate the subscriptions based on their value-add features and operate an upper bound of $25/mo on the amount charged for searches for all tiers?
Because the cost of all other features pales in comparison to the cost of search. In general if a feature does not costs us anything we do not charge the user for it (example: bangs are free).
> If you're making money off of the subscription, why don't the search quotas roll over?
Two main reasons:
- It means more billing systems to build and we are eager to work on search features like this update
- Something still has to pay for all our additional costs like free trial account searches and salaries
> It's worth bearing in mind that issues for potential users may not be a problem for existing users, apportioning time to the desires of both groups is a difficult balance.
Agreed and it is a matter of product roadmap prioritization. While the issue was previously raised, it had only one upvote. Now that we got more alarming feedback it was prioritized internally and 5 and 9 from your list should be addressed asap (others do not really apply as we do run a full search for those).
> My personal perspective is that it's absolutely unacceptable for a company to double-charge due to their own UI decisions.
I agree with this perspective and as I hopefully explained that was not the intent, but a bug.
Mmh, so your excuse for using dark patterns that are designed to overcharge users is that not enough of your users have noticed and complained? Are your users supposed to be UX experts?
Our users notice and (rightfully) complain about everything that is not right - because they pay for the service.
My "excuse" for some of these things not being fixed is that they have low perceived impact in practice and/or lack of resources to address all issues at once (hence roadmap).
Thanks for posting this, I've been curious about what counts as a search to Kagi. On one hand, I get it: making requests obviously costs them money, and they certainly don't owe me anything as a non-user anyway. But I'm even less likely to switch to it with this knowledge, because this just doesn't fit well with how I search for things. It doesn't jive with the mental model of what I would think of as a search in my head as an end user, where changing the actual search terms is obviously a new search, but filtering, reloading, viewing the next page, etc, are just part of the same search.
Great, I think we deserve an honest discussion about this. When you say "hey my product is $10/month, please adopt it", users are going to factor that pricing information into their decision of whether to adopt the product. That's the bait. Later, once you have persuaded the consumer to adopt your product, changing the terms in a way that are significantly less favorable to the consumer (the switch) has the appearance of fraud. You further misrepresent Kagi as some kind of expert in the search space, while presenting a bait and switch defense basically stating that you're only now learning the "realities of the search market". So, which is it? Isn't "we didn't know the realities of _____ market" just a cop out that anyone committing fraud can claim? Why not grandfather in your early adopters? I think if you could answer some of these questions in good faith it would go a long way -- as it stands you're just embarrassing your organization.
I like duckduckgo but now I prefer bing, mostly for the bing chat inclusion. Yet I miss the ! shortcuts from DDG, and after trying it at a friend, I'd like to use Kagi too (so yes, I want everything and the kitchensync)
Would you have a product that would also use ! shortcuts and do some bing chat like search on top of Kagi?
By bing chat, I mean not just openai, but doing queries to augment the answer. I'd be happy to pay for it, especially if you offered an API to specify a few basics (ex: what is XX? Please augment your answer using results using this search query:" ")
Kagi doesn’t have a chatbot, but they have recently added some thoughtful Generative AI features. They tend to start with the search results and then summarize.
> They know very well that someone for pays for Kagi (or even knows about Kagi) doesn't perform three or four searches a day.
Fwiw, i pay for Kagi and i am totally inline with their estimates. Maybe a pinch more, 7 instead of 4 atm. But at $5/m i can't complain, and so far (it's new to me) i've found myself not falling back to Google.
I was on DDG for ~2 years and i constantly opened up Startpage (aka Google) and sometimes even Google. I've been very happy with Kagi, so far.
Not sure i'd pay $20/m, but $5/m is a very nice value to me. I hope things work well for them.
edit: Sidenote, but the first thing i noticed is just how damn fast Kagi is. Not really a selling point to me, but wow.
They literally provide sources for those claims. I have no idea how you can say with a straight face that they're dishonest. They're very clear and transparent about how their plans are limited.
It's also extremely easy to check what your usage is for the current month and get a monthly overview. If you happen to use more than the 200 searches for the standard plan, they charge 1.5 cents per search. If you blow past it and end up using another 500 searches, which matches the $10 plan, you're still only paying $12.5.
They also provide soft and hard limits to how many searches you can use to avoid unexpected charges.
Like, I honestly don't know what else you expect them to do.
edit: Also, for reference, as a heavy user who basically lives in their search engine, my total searches for previous months are: 786, 782, 610, 519, 717.
The GP didn't say they're lying about the number, the claim was that the number isn't representative of the amount of Google searches Kagi users are likely to perform.
Kagi pricing page does not talk about Kagi users but Internet users, which Kagi is trying to attract with the $5 plan.
Almost all of current Kagi users are in the other 1% category, but that doesn’t change the fact that vast majority of internet users search 2-3 times a day and that Kagi would like to attract them with this plan.
The obvious implication of putting that on a pricing page is that the average internet user accurately represents the average Kagi user.
I have no idea if that's true or not, but if it isn't, then there isn't really a way to "word it differently" - including the information at all is misleading.
I’m trying to follow the complaint but not getting it.
Are you saying that the average Kagi user, who is an internet power user doing far more than 4 searches a day, is going to be misled into believing they are an average internet user and that they really only do 4 searches a day?
Why is it not representative? I was surprised by this recent Kagi pricing change but after reviewing my search stats I realized that their estimation is pretty on point.
I don't know, it seems low, but it works for me, but I still just use Google for most things. Like most of my searches are simple things where Google is fine. Recipes, weather, easy queries. For more advanced stuff where Google doesn't work I use kagi with fair success. Like today I was looking for an obituary from 1843 and Google just kept giving me shit about the Ukraine War. Kagi worked! But also gave me some Ukraine War results, but somehow the most relevant page was near the top of Kagi but nowhere to be found on Google even with multiple searches.
So you essentially have to budget your queries to make sure you have enough. Which is unproductive. The "simple queries" should already be cached aon the server and should not even count to the quota.
To clarify, there is no limit on Kagi. Searches are 1.5 cents per search (after those included with subscription) and you can do as many as you’d like. Or get an unlimited plan. A lot of things don’t cost a search (bangs, reloads etc..)
i hit my 1000 search limit yesterday, and my cycle is up in a little over a week. I was a little miffed, but there is a helpful button that just redos your search in google
it was my first time using google search in a few months since i started kagi, but.... have google's results become better?
maybe voting with our wallets worked, and google is rolling back some of their less popular recent ranking changes
I was a customer for a few months until they decide to raise it. I do, on average, 30-40 searches per day. I'll need the $25 plan and while they are (subjectively) better than Google, I couldn't really justify the price bump.
It also doesn't say what currency it's in anywhere on that page. Is that my local currency or (presumably) USD? That makes a very large difference to my price.
That's because these demos seem to be out of date (originally those were for WebKit's WebGPU prototype, and then probably updated along the way but not completely).
