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Update to Kagi Search Pricing

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#101

Post by tome »

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #86
_frkl wrote: post #79

I have to admit, I'm a bit disappointed by the mostly negative responses here, I wouldn't have thought this would be received as badly as it apparently is, by this here crowd. I haven't followed along that closely, but I dropped by their discord every once in a while, and from the discussions I saw I felt Kagi was as open as they could be, trying to communicate the upcoming change(s), why they are necessary, getting…

Chiming in to say I feel exactly this way too.

Me too. I think the cost/benefit calculus is pretty simple. The pricing is around 1.5 cents per search. Let's say someone does 600 searches, which is about what I do in a month, or around 20 per day. That costs around $10.

For someone with a net income of $20 per hour (a lot of people in the US), that's 30 minutes of time. Can Kagi save 30 minutes over 600 searches in a month, or 1 minute per day over 20 searches? I'm pretty sure it can easily, yes. The result quality for me is far better than DDG (which I'd realistically be using otherwise, for privacy reasons) or even Google.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#102

Post by infinityio »

(subscriber for the past 8 months, planning to convert to annual to lock in $10/mo for the next year and reassess then)

The AI tools they have been releasing are interesting, but Kagi desperately needs to decrease their average cost-per-search so that they can offer more realistic numbers of queries per month at a $10 price point.

I'm not sure what the solution is - maybe generating smaller indices for particular verticals? For some classes of question (for example looking up documentation) I would expect there are a surprisingly small number of sites that consistently end up as top 3 results, and everything else can be put behind a 'load more' button that queries the paid APIs.

(The problem then becomes identifying when this is the case)

While it wouldn't 'fix' the cost of long tail searches, identifying 'easy' searches and answering them directly might help - looking at my own search history, I'd say maybe 1 in 3 of my queries would fall under this category.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#103

Post by compsciphd »

This actually could be a business model (in a very dirty way) for something that I prototyped years ago, that really didn't have a business model behind it.

My thought was to make a personal search engine. i.e. it wasn't about indexing the internet (though perhaps there was value to that in combination), but to index what you've seen / your social network shares with you (easier when the APIs to said social networks were actually usable, that's sort of gone the way of the dodo).

The problem is, while searching what you've seen / social network shares with you is "nice", how often are you actually going to use it? My thought was to make a browser extension that would make that passive, i.e. constantly show you what's related to the page you are looking at, from said index (using lucene's 'more like this' type search). My implementation was clean (not dirty like I said above), because it was all client side, nothing stored on any servers.

A dirty business model using a similar business model to this, would be to store everything online, and charge people to search their data, but they would be giving up all their privacy to this index then (hence the dirty part).

I also thought of targeted ads in the extension, but that would seemingly be a related privacy issue.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#104

Post by bionade24 »

On 2nd march I did 105 searches and Kagi tells me it costed $1.31. I'm currently paying more than I search. Still, with the new model, I'd pay more. Guess I'll cancel my subscription, too.

The lenses are still garbage too, where "wiki.*" doesn't match "wiki.domain.tld".

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#105

Post by Aeolun »

threatofrain wrote: post #98
soco wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your concerns are valid indeed, and on top of them one must also think about what's the alternative. Because if you leave service A you'll necessarily use service B - I assume nobody leaves Kagi to give up searching. So the choice is between a possible bad outcome (Kagi) versus a known bad outcome (Google).

The difference in privacy I see between Kagi and Google is that Kagi requires me to have a signed-in account to search, and Kagi accurately associates more valuable information with a signed-in account.

I don’t think you can have both ad-free (e.g. paid) search and anonymous search at the same time.

You have to pick one. And you can’t really fault Kagi for providing the one when the other is already “adequately” covered by Google.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#106

Post by Aeolun »

7vaS7SXdKF wrote: post #42
microtonal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan of the changes otherwise. I average around 1100 searches per month which would require me to get the unlimited plan. I don't like the changes either, but I don't think this is true. You could get the 1000 searches plan for $10 and then pay-per-search the additional 100 searches.

Fair, thank you for pointing that out. The idea of paying per query for a search engine seems so alien to me that I just skipped over this option.

> The idea of paying per query for a search engine seems so alien to me

That’s odd. It seems like the most natural thing ever to me.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#108

Post by crimsontech »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #48

I cancelled by Kagi subscription because of this. I don't want to have to pause before I search and think "do I need to search for this? should I look through my bookmarks, notes, etc? is this worth one of the 7 searches my $5 plan will cover for the day?". I've been a frequent user of Kagi for the past ~9 months. Last month I made 1600 searches. I've even 'tipped the difference' (~$70) in the past to support Kagi. I…

When I saw this my initial reaction was to cancel, then I checked my usage with the early adopter professional plan it seems I'm mostly covered with 1000 searches a month inlcuded in the $10 subscription. Maybe some months I'll incur a small charge but nothing over $14 I don't imagine.

I could also reduce the cost pretty easily if I'm honest. I could stop searching for a site and clicking the result rather than entering the URL or using a bookmark. I could use a sites search function more often too rather than searching kagi for website name + keyword.

Some years ago I moved to a house with a water meter, previously I paid a flat rate and could use as much water as I wanted. I wasn't happy at first, but when I thought about it, being mindful about how much water I'm using is a good thing. Even if I live in a country where it rains constantly.

I'll keep on using and paying for Kagi, I really like what they are doing so far.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#109

Post by kmfrk »

This is a bit confusing, but the UX around is also not great.

Can't we have some basic place where we can see our alotted number of searches for one, especially as it's now set to change? On top of how there's not only new and changed tiers, but also separate legacy tiers. Going through a number of clicks in Billing just to see what our search frequency was the past months is kind of a pain.

Rather than having to stay up to day with news, a more intuitive interface for this would help a lot. Worst-case scenario is that loyal customers get a surprise bill next month.

Re: Update to Kagi Search Pricing

#110

Post by api »

islon wrote: post #90
newaccount74 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what becomes clear from this price increase is how expensive search is. Google seems to be free, but they are making a profit by gatekeeping the internet. If you offer a product or service, and you want people to find your restaurant, your hotel, your guided tour, your private tutoring lessons, or anything else, you pretty much have to pay Google. It's kinda like the Yellow Pages, except 100x more expensive.…

I'm paying ~10 bucks for spotify to stream music non stop. I'm also paying netflix some ~16 bucks for 4K movies/series. There's no way a text search is more expensive than a 4k, 5.1 channels movie. I'm using Kagi since they were in beta, but as soon as my subscription expires, I'm done...

It certainly can be more expensive than streaming. Bandwidth is very cheap. (Cloud provider bandwidth charges are completely artificial and pure profit.) Search requires a lot more compute and fast storage as well as more developers since it’s a much harder problem.
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