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Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

blog.kagi.com

261–270 of 294 posts

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#261
post #44

"Privacy by default" I don't know. To me, requiring me to give them my email and then having all my searches associated with that email is the opposite of privacy to me. Yes, Google, Bing, Perplexity and Co could do fingerprinting and try fuzzy matching to cluster my searches. But at least that would be fuzzy and against the law in many places. While with Kagi, every search of mine would be clearly labeled as coming…

Maybe their privacy pass is useful then? https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

Unfortunately the assistant officially does not work with Privacy Pass, for some inexplicable reason.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#262
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Google should offer Advanced Portable for $30 that includes being able to plug it into third party services. With some kind of policing to prevent it from being used as the entire backend to a service (for all users) itself.

Third party usage is too disparate for a single flat rate to make sense. Perplexity probably uses orders of magnitude more tokens than Kagi does (the former uses tokens on every search, the latter only does if you manually invoke the Assistant). Then there's the disparity in how many third party services each user uses. Some will use one, some will use 50. Google could charge per integration, but that's basically the…

Why would the number of integrations be the price point and not token tiers? I might want to connect my account to 100 services to test them, but only perform a couple uses each before forgetting about it.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#263
post #243
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer identity as the top layer. Give me an identity portal that acts as an account manager, access to api layer, let me perform password resets, and let me avoid 2fa if I’m logged into my identity manager account. It should allow bidirectional control: both what services have access to my identity, and what services anything in my identity are granted access to access. Things like LLM, cloud storage etc should be…

Who is going to pay for identity as a product and not just expect it as a free feature of another product suite?

Why not both? Use Apple or Microsoft or a third party identity provider.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#264
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use the $5/month plan, and the few times I have exceeded the 300-search limit, Kagi simply renews my monthly plan early. For me it's just happened a few times towards the end of the month and I was happy with how they handled the situation.

That is actually a really nice model. Effectively it is 300 Search for $5 valid for one month. And instantly renew if you exceed $5. May be Kagi could also consider rolling over unused search for one month. So if you only did 200 searches, the remaining 100 will roll over to next month so you have 400 searches.

At some point this is becoming a really roundabout way to implement 1 search = 1.67 cents

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#265
post #211
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that Kagi’s price point might be a close approximation of what these services actually cost to provide without being subsidized by ad services and data harvesting; free search can only really sustain itself under those conditions. Heavy users who block ads have been getting subsidized by other users for decades now, and this has led these users to expect these services to be provided at an unrealistically l…

If they can't scale 300 searches for way less than $5 in costs, they are doing something very wrong. Consider that you can get 1M tokens of inference for less.

That $5 has to cover organizational costs, not just compute. There's 40+ employees, so salaries alone would be a significant chunk of their entire income if all of the 45k members were on the $5/mo plan.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#267
post #44

"Privacy by default" I don't know. To me, requiring me to give them my email and then having all my searches associated with that email is the opposite of privacy to me. Yes, Google, Bing, Perplexity and Co could do fingerprinting and try fuzzy matching to cluster my searches. But at least that would be fuzzy and against the law in many places. While with Kagi, every search of mine would be clearly labeled as coming…

Don't give them "your" email. Give them a mail alias, which I am sure as a privacy conscious person you already have, and you are good. They also recommend to do so themselves.

However, the most important argument here is not the fact that they are legally bound to those privacy commitments (they are), but that their business incentives are fundamentally incompatible with tracking users. For a very niche business with an extremely narrow and homogeneous user base, if they would get caught doing so, it would be game over. The privacy pass feature is available if you don't trust, and you can verify since everything relevant happens client side.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#268
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third party usage is too disparate for a single flat rate to make sense. Perplexity probably uses orders of magnitude more tokens than Kagi does (the former uses tokens on every search, the latter only does if you manually invoke the Assistant). Then there's the disparity in how many third party services each user uses. Some will use one, some will use 50. Google could charge per integration, but that's basically the…

Why would the number of integrations be the price point and not token tiers? I might want to connect my account to 100 services to test them, but only perform a couple uses each before forgetting about it.

I agree that makes sense, but it makes potential subscribers to the third parties nervous. I like Kagi Assistant because my payment is capped.

I get nervous plugging my pay-as-you-go API keys into random software because of the risk they rack up a $1000 bill doing something I wouldn’t have paid $20 for them to do.

The other three things are that economies of scale make it cheaper for Kagi to buy a bajillion tokens, Google et al don’t want to manage the customer side of things (what service ate how many tokens?), and service providers don’t want you seeing their “magic” in your console. Seems like there’s a lot of power in the system instruction side of things, and Perplexity probably doesn’t want you seeing their prompt.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#269
post #135

I've been wanting to try and see whether I can consolidate my phind.com and my kagi.com subs by upgrading my Kagi plan. They are kinda forcing me to try now :-)

I tried, and Kagi is better in some aspects like ease to edit questions. Haven't seen any a downside yet, and the option of creating multiple profiles seems interesting.

Re: Kagi Assistant is now available to all users

#270
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about how you think about the "value" for a service like Kagi? What determines how much it is worth to you? I don't think that Kagi is for everyone, but, at least for my own internal model of value, Kagi comes out so far ahead, that I'm curious about alternate ways of thinking about value that don't see it that way (to be extra clear: I do not think that my view is the "correct" view or only view).

How do you think about its value? I too am interested in others' perspectives. I'm not the person you asked, but I rarely do more than "{query} reddit" or "{technology name} {documentation-oriented query}". Google, or any of its free competitors, work fine for that. On top of that I'm subscription averse: the only "digital" subscription I have is additional google drive capacity and a VPS, which together cost less th…

For me, it is how much faster I find the results I want than I was with Google. The results are enough better that, at the rate I value my time, I'm more than making up the subscription cost every month.

And then the gravy on top is that I fundamentally think that direct payment is a "better" (both from a consumer perspective and from a societal perspective) model than an ad-supported model, so I'm also supporting a company that aligns with that larger philosophical viewpoint.

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