User since beta, subscriber since he started charging, and my primary search engine since January. About 500 searches a month. Very happy customer. I do a monthly sweep of subscriptions to make sure we are using all of it, and I never think about dropping Kagi. It keeps getting better, not worse like every other search engine, and the reason is because the user is the customer, not advertisers. Every ad-supported medium turns to shit, no matter where it starts out.
Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
141–150 of 168 posts
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 f…
> 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 th…
Great questions!
> 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.
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
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.
Was it ever, really, free, though? you and I were never, really, the customer, ultimately
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly does your search engine where the engine can't see the search term work?
You can POST it, and some privacy oriented web tools do that instead of GET, but the reason, as explained elsewhere, is not to hide it from NSA (GET parameters and POST are equally easy/hard to intercept), but to protect against other persons who has access to ones unencrypted computer (spouse, kids, colleagues).
That'd protect against other people who have access to the computer but not the technical skill to install any kind of logger.
Couldn't you also just open an incognito window?
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#145Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#146Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Was it ever, really, free, though? you and I were never, really, the customer, ultimately
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.
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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 o…
> 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.
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#149https://kagi.com/pricing?plan=individual 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…
(Kagi founder here) 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…
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.
Re: Enhancements to the Kagi Search Experience
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Kagi founder here) 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…
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 off…
Thanks for constructive feedback.
> 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?