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Fair Pricing

kagi.com

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Re: Fair Pricing

#171

Post by gkbrk »

leokennis wrote: post #145

I find Kagi to be very expensive. $10 a month for unlimited pricing. For around the same price, I can stream millions of songs, or stream thousands of high res videos, or subscribe to both premium e-mail and a premium task manager. What makes web search so expensive?

How do you stream millions of songs per month when there is 43,200 minutes in a month?

If what you mean is you can pick from their library of millions of songs, Kagi sounds like an even better deal. For $10 a month you can search 400 billion web pages.

Re: Fair Pricing

#172

Post by CarRamrod »

user3939382 wrote: post #104
ajdude wrote: post #86

Unfortunately, I will never be able to take advantage of this policy, For the very reason that I have kagi Set as my exclusive search engine on every single device that I own, And there's no way that I could go even a Day, let alone a month, without using this fantastic service. Keep up the good work guys!

My pitch to friends is that it’s like Google used to be before they started adding all the crap to their results and ignoring your search terms. Really, it’s even better than that given the full feature set.

Note to self: Make something good enough that friends will feel the need to make up pitches for their friends to use said thing.

Re: Fair Pricing

#173

Post by ffsm8 »

mathw wrote: post #141
eviks wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...

This is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake. I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.

Technically, they do

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149

But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as you're imagining

Re: Fair Pricing

#174

Post by reddalo »

hnlurker22 wrote: post #156

Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?

I don't know if it has a name, but Scott Galloway's "The Four" describes this phenomenon as the reason why people love their Apple phones and computers so much; they're overpriced products, so they must love them in order not to feel like "idiots".

Re: Fair Pricing

#175

Post by sillyfluke »

gkbrk wrote: post #159
sillyfluke wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, in this political climate I'm definitely going to voluntarily tie my and my children's search results to my credit card. As long as people continue to gush about how amazing this service is, I'm going to gush about how ridiculuous this proposition is.

You think Kagi tracks you, to the risk of killing their business, but Google doesn't track you or collect data about your searches?

yes I do think there is a important difference between google triangulating data, trading data with others and attaching a name to an ip adress by their own efforts without me voluntarily giving them that information for free. And you seem to forget that Google lost a class action suit about incognito mode. And I'd rather sue Google than Kagi. Plus, like 23andme, when times are tough I don't want to think about what a smaller company in dire straits will do with my dafa.

Re: Fair Pricing

#176

Post by vasco »

BossingAround wrote: post #123
quser1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's called car rentals :)

With the advent of various car renting apps, I was so excited about not owning a car, and basically using just-in-time renting option. Turns out, at least in my part of the world ([0]), that it's such a PITA. When you plan ahead, it's manageable. Sometimes, a car for renting is not available long term because people plan for the same time (e.g. holidays) and the provider doesn't have big enough car fleet to cover the…

I live the rental only life and only when needed. That being said when I looked at buying a car, it would be cheaper if bought second hand as it basically doesn't depreciate unless you drive commercially. The key is getting something that is already old and with a lot of mileage. Adding 10% more mileage to a car with 100k+ miles and adding 3 or 4 years to a 15 year old car doesn't really depreciate, it's all the same value. So if you ride the wave of old second hand cars you can switch every few years and you can even sell them for higher than you got them in years where the second hand market moves up.

Re: Fair Pricing

#177

Post by Unearned5161 »

hnlurker22 wrote: post #156

Only paying customers seem happy about Kagi. I have a strange feeling that a lot of paying customers think Kagi search is "better" just because their brain wants to justify them paying for search. Is there a psychological term for such a syndrome?

You should also ask yourself if there's a psychological effect making you think that the people on the other side of the fence are delusional.

Admittedly it's a tough current to pitch yourself against, that search should be a paid service. But that's mainly because the best advertising company in the world is leading the charge on the other side.

The truth on who's more delusional appears murky to me...

Re: Fair Pricing

#178

Post by andyjohnson0 »

ant6n wrote: post #120
dirkc wrote: post #75

This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it. So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you wou…

I dunno. The thing is, Kagi isn’t really that much better than Google. When they still had a free tier, I tried it every once in a while, and it quickly wastes a lot of searches even while just entering queries, and then the chance to find something better than Google is mediocre. Perhaps a prepaid model might make more sense, especially if it’s designed not to blow through queries quickly and transparent about how m…

I've been a paying Kagi user since the beta - and thats because I get good value from it. Out of the box the search results were, and are, much better than Google or Bing. The ability to raise, lower, or block the priority of sites adds to that and gives me a very personalised tool. I'm very happy that it exists.

On the other hand, the fact that we're having this discussion does point to how difficult it is for Kagi to explain its value proposition and differentiate itself from Google.

As for chatgpt - I'd say its functionality relative to google search is obvious, but not it's value.

Re: Fair Pricing

#179

Post by tacomagick »

ant6n wrote: post #160
pfix wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From kagi.com: > No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search. So you are not paying for better search but for no tracking and no ads. If you don't care about those, you're not kagi target audience.

you can get that on DuckDuckGo. The main problem with Google is that the search is garbage. Kagi wasn't able to convince me that their better within the free searches (I have an account since 2022). Now that I can't try them anymore, they can't ever convince me they're better - so their pricing model perhaps isn't very smart.

People see no tracking and just trust it nowadays? I'd much rather use a public SearX/NG instance than to trust something that claims to have no tracking and isn't open source. Same thing with DuckDuckGo.

Re: Fair Pricing

#180

Post by thayne »

bandrami wrote: post #161
ogrisel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.

Fifteen years ago people were talking about micropayments per article for news services being just around the corner. What ever happened to that?

A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an unsolveable problem, but there are significant network effects that would need to be overcome.
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