Long time Kagi subscriber here. I think their focus should be to reduce resource usage on their side and make servers cheaper to run. Not other shenanigans like t-shirt or FastGPT or whatever. They can then offer a more attractive price for general public, who has never paid for search before and gets caught in the headlights when they hear you pay. Because right now, they don’t even have 40k users and if it goes on…
It's already dirt cheap at $10 per month. Businesses who want to be successful do not bargain on their prices to try to satisfy cheapskates who are never satisfied with anything else than free anyway. They set a fair price for their product and continue to improve the value they bring to real, paying customers. With that said, they should of course reduce their operating costs when they can, just like any business.
That‘s why it should be their focus to find a sweet spot, where it‘s still acceptable for general public to pull the trigger and subscribe and for them to keep doing this.
This is not a streaming service or whatever. Their starting point was to fight Google who don‘t give a fuck about privacy and show that it‘s possible to fix the search, which Google fucked up during the years. I am also a subscriber because of this mindset, not just because it is a „product“ of a business who wants to be successful. At least that‘s what Kagi & CEO looks like at the moment.
My criticism is directed to AI and the stuff they are working on. Because of all these AI and shenanigans, they are focusing their valuable time to something other than becoming the big guy in privacy sphere. Customer counts show that. And I am 100% sure that if Kagi would cost 4,99$ a month, we would be talking about hundreds of thousands of users already.