Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

> We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!

We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.

That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system.

It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance.

So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge.

A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once.

It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached.

You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.

Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.

> How do you price articles?

The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear.

> And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views?

Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example.

> but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half.

Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled.

That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers.

(As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.)

> On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.

This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.

> They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.

Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.

There was this https://blog.torproject.org/funding-internet-freedom-togethe...

That's a good idea and it could give you a checklist to select the projects you want to support.

Signal, Tor, and GrapheneOS(through github) have monthly recurring option so you can just set that up once.

I really like the direction Kagi is taking here. It feels like theyre' building the product around how people actually use it rather than chasing every new AI trend