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Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#31

Post by freediver »

jacekm wrote: post #21
mhitza wrote: post #10

The post hints at this, but having a shop where one can buy a privacy pass without an account makes sense. Should support some crypto currency (probably monero), and something like GNU Taler if that technology ever becomes usable.

Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.

(vlad here) Rather, we are opportunistic about it and we want to focus on things that make impact (which most of the time is search, not billing). If there is enough demand, we will work on Monero support - and yes I agree, buying privacy pass tokens, without even needing an account, is one of those super-cool use cases.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#32

Post by RussianCow »

godelski wrote: post #18

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

I pay $10/month just to have search results that aren't littered with SEO spam. The time savings alone make it totally worth it for me. Everything else is a giant bonus.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#33

Post by redserk »

godelski wrote: post #18

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

$10 felt a bit steep until I realized there is probably the economies of scale at play here.

1) There is a marginal payment overhead. I'd assume $0.50-0.75, leaving their amount down to $9-ish.

2) It's a fairly niche product with a still-small userbase. ~40k users at ~$9/mo = $360k/mo (I know there's $5/mo users and $25/mo users but I'd assume there are far more $5/mo and $10/mo users than $25/mo users)

3) They have to keep the service running 24/7/365, so you have to hire devs either across multiple time-zones or compensate them enough to be OK fighting fires at 2am.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#34

Post by hedora »

godelski wrote: post #18

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

If you can pay $10/month for a better search experience, then Google's making way more than that much off your data.

Kagi saves me much more than $10 of time every month. I definitely don't regret the subscription cost. Their LLM thing (append "?" to your internet search query) is worth more than that on its own.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#35

Post by thibaultmol »

drdaeman wrote: post #28

Neat! It's rare to see that a service you use actually does something that benefits the user rather that itself. An unexpected, but a really pleasant surprise. I wish this extension would integrate better with the browser by automatically understanding the context. That is, if I'm in a "regular" mode it'll use my session, but if I'm in a "private browsing" mode (`browser.extension.inIncognitoContext`) it'll use Priva…

yeah, same. I would only use privacy pass for icognito searches COUGH P0RN COUGH mainly (let's be honest). Feel free to submit the idea on kagifeedback.org

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#36

Post by freediver »

mhitza wrote: post #27
jacekm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.

Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level. At the same time, privacy pass is a very…

We implemented Privacy Pass exactly so that you do not need to trust any claims we make but as a user have a (provable, cryptographically) mechanism that guarantees this, with one click, whenever you need it.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#37

Post by dcow »

godelski wrote: post #18

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

I’ve been paying for Kagi for a long time through all their pricing model changes and updates. I have never once hit the search limit. I know they base their tiers on market research of search volume balanced against cost of serving a query. If you’re looking for reasons not to pay for search, you’ll find them. But the pricing model is hardly one. If you want an amazing and respectful search experience, and want to back a company that’s truly doing right by users and innovating at the same time, give Kagi a try!

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#38

Post by thibaultmol »

mhitza wrote: post #27
jacekm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi accepts bitcoins but Vlad (the founder) mentioned on their forum that so few people use this option that it does not make sense to work on accepting Monero.

Kagi's privacy guarantee is more of a "trust me bro" and I say that as a Kagi subscriber. While they may claim that they preserve privacy or anonimity as long as it's tied to a user account, or payment information nothing prevents them from associating searches with user. Even protonmail enabled logging for a particular user at one point. Their guarantee is on the same level. At the same time, privacy pass is a very…

the privacy pass extension is open source exactly because users can then verify the process. and yeah, to prevent reselling they've made it so you can't get infinite tokens.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#39

Post by thoughtpalette »

godelski wrote: post #18

This seems cool, but I still think the pricing of kagi is rather steep. It is $5/mo for 300 searches a month, which is really going to get you under 10 a day... That's insufficient. Then $10/mo (or $108/yr) for unlimited. I'm curious if anyone knows, are companies like Google and Microsoft making more than $10/mo/user? We often talk about paying with our data, but it is always unclear how much that data is worth. Kag…

FWIW I signed up about 4 months ago on the starter plan and I'm definitely going to run over. I could be smarter about my searches though. I've switched to kagi on ALL of my devices, including work devices. And I could have searched to using google for most gifts/maps stuff instead.

some anecdotal data:

11/2024: 183 searches

12/2024: 360

1/2025: 376

2/2025: already at 222

Will definitely (happily) have to upgrade to the $10 plan. It's been great.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#40

Post by sebazzz »

ajayyy wrote: post #9
cobertos wrote: post #4

What's to stop someone on the Kagi side from just adding a new column to the token table that has the user (with their SessionCookie) who generated the token next to it? I don't see how this can't be trivially connected to the original token generator.

The tokens are "generated" on the client, and the server just gives the client enough information to make that locally generated token become "valid", without being able to link that token to a specific validation attempt

So basically the server signs the token and afterwards the server can verify its own signature for every request with that token?
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