11–20 of 239 posts
There will be a company that dethrones Google in search, but it might take some time
Kagi is a bit of a HN darling so I know I'm putting my neck out here, but even after trying the trial, I'm not sure what the value prop is. I would happily pay for a search engine that provided good results, but seeing as it's ostensibly Just Bing under the hood, I'm not sure what I get that I'm not getting from DDG or MetaGer + an ad blocker. Kagi doesn't strike me as a privacy alternative given that all my searches…
I pay mainly as an experiment to figure out what my searches actually cost.
If those costs are covered by advertisers that I block, my free search experience is paid for by people who don’t block those ads. I don’t like that thought.
I may go back to DDG if the new payment structure is insufficient (I don’t know if I search more than 1.000 times a month). But it is somewhat eye-opening how much I take search for granted.
I have used Brave search that gives similar search results for way less money.
> Search limit reached.
Kagi is a bit of a HN darling so I know I'm putting my neck out here, but even after trying the trial, I'm not sure what the value prop is. I would happily pay for a search engine that provided good results, but seeing as it's ostensibly Just Bing under the hood, I'm not sure what I get that I'm not getting from DDG or MetaGer + an ad blocker. Kagi doesn't strike me as a privacy alternative given that all my searches…
That said, while I've been happily paying $10/mo for the pro plan for a while, I'm not convinced the 1000 searches/mo will suffice. Guess I'll find out soon enough.
Update: I checked https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption and to my surprise I'm averaging under 20 searches a day total, even though Kagi is my main search engine on both mobile and desktop. So looks like I'll be OK after all.
I understand that they may need to adjust prices, but having a search limit just feels ... bad. Imaging being on the go, trying to look something up quickly, only to be presented with the message > Search limit reached.
They're charging 0.015 per search when you're "over limit" but 200 searches would be $3 on "pay as you go" after your plan runs out, which is better than the bundled 200 for $5.
The $10 plan is only marginally better, 700 searches (cost $10.50 PAYG) for $10.
Here are my search counts and costs to Kagi for the recent months as a student, mostly traveling in Feb. Feb 2023 1253 $15.66 Jan 2023 1612 $20.15 Dec 2022 1390 $17.38 Bummed by this change, I guess I'll snag the yearly plan now and see were we are 12 months from now. I don't know if kagis results are better but the experience is so much better for me and I love being able to prioritize sites I care about in results.
Presumably though, they don't see this as sustainable. I wonder why? What kind of margin are they looking for here?