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Fair Pricing

kagi.com

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Re: Fair Pricing

#321

Post by robertlagrant »

idle_zealot wrote: post #69
vincnetas wrote: post #25

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated f…

> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it. Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.

See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.

Re: Fair Pricing

#322

Post by robertlagrant »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #93
vincnetas wrote: post #25

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated f…

Slack does, or did, do this. I believe Trello, too. I found out about this because I noticed our Slack bill was quite a lot lower over some Christmas/January period. It was because so many folks were away, and so they didn't charge us for seats that were inactive for > 30 days.

Yes, lots of businesses charge based on MAU. You can pre-pay for a certain MAU, which will get you a lower price per user, but at the expense of paying even if they aren't used. Which is fair enough.

Re: Fair Pricing

#323

Post by scott_w »

jgalt212 wrote: post #274
scott_w wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low. I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-…

Fair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.

Correct, your churn would be artificially lowered, so you'd probably want to define a point where a "paused" subscription is effectively inactive and count that against churn.

It would still show in other metrics, however, as you'd have monthly active users (or accounts), which would take a hit. You'd also see a drop in MRR when an account is paused.

Bear in mind I'm assuming a business that wants clear, accurate metrics so the executive team know what actions to take; not simply a business looking to scam investors out of money ;-)

Re: Fair Pricing

#325

Post by wongarsu »

KomoD wrote: post #273
eitland wrote: post #268

Tangentially related: Whenever I mention Kagi is actually better, someone will claim the opposite. So yesterday someone here said something along the lines of: "With apologies to Bill Buxton every user interface is best at something and worst at something else". So I started looking on Kagi and only found a few results, even if I took parts of it, but I narrowed it down to that the original must have been about "ever…

I get 2 results from that Kagi link and they're both what I'd consider to be spam.

Three now, one of them this thread.

I'm not sure I'd agree the other two are spam. One of them is a plain-text transcript of some sharepoint files that mentions the quote and attributes them to the same person. The other is the same powerpoint, but in its original on some slide sharing website.

In many cases, either would be a great result. Here it still gives us the direct quote and confirms that all the way back in 2013 somebody attributed it to the same guy. That's a great lead if you try to track down the origin of a quote. If you cared enough you could now contact the person who made the slides to track the quote further.

Re: Fair Pricing

#326

Post by thinkingtoilet »

Novosell wrote: post #299
mbix77 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War, invasion, terrorism,... take your pick.

Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi and google primarily operate, has never done anything repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.

Classic whataboustism. If you don't want to use something because of the US's geo-political actions, go for it.

Re: Fair Pricing

#327

Post by promiseofbeans »

g_p wrote: post #312
dizhn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real privacy oriented solutions REMOVE their ABILITY to keep your data. This is the reason I will probably never use Kagi. I am not logging into a search engine. Period. (I know this is futile,but it's the principle of the thing. And I don't want this to be more commonplace than it already is.)

You might find Privacy Pass of interest then - https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html It should be out in the next day or so.

Ooh this is interesting. Theoretically these could still be associated with my account right? Since you need to use my session token to generate these privacy tokens. Is there a technical explainer somewhere with instructions for setting this up without a web extension?

Edit: Looking into it, it seems like this uses the same mechanism for tokens as Cloudflare's turnstile system: https://privacypass.github.io/ or for the proper standard https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html

Excerpt that explains how it works:

> When an internet challenge is solved correctly by a user, Privacy Pass will generate a number of random nonces that will be used as tokens. These tokens will be cryptographically blinded and then sent to the challenge provider. If the solution is valid, the provider will sign the blinded tokens and return them to the client. Privacy Pass will unblind the tokens and store them for future use.

So it seems like as long as the cryptography is done right and Kagi's webextension does what it says, they are actually private.

Re: Fair Pricing

#328

Post by wongarsu »

percevalve wrote: post #217

I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here. A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they…

Seeing how much revenue subscription services make from inactive customers (and how much I have paid over my lifetime to services I no longer used) people don't overestimate this at all. If anything, users still underestimate it.

The disconnect between the researchers and people's actual estimations is that "cancelling a service" is much harder than the couple button clicks it usually takes. You have a structural problem: If you don't use a service, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's easy to cancel something if you make a conscious decision to stop using something. But if it just gradually falls out of use, your only reminder that you should cancel it are your bank statements or the occasional payment reminder email (that some services avoid sending for exactly this reason).

Re: Fair Pricing

#329

Post by Novosell »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #326
Novosell wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the belief that the US, in which bing, kagi and google primarily operate, has never done anything repugnant? Seems like ignoring that while cutting ties with Yandex because of Russia is a very political move.

Classic whataboustism. If you don't want to use something because of the US's geo-political actions, go for it.

>If you don't want to use something because of the US's geo-political actions, go for it.

Thanks for giving me permission, much appreciated. I needed that.

Responding "classic whataboutism" isn't very productive, just kills the conversation and makes it impossible to point out potential hypocrisy. Classic reddit comment.

Re: Fair Pricing

#330

Post by Seb-C »

fnord123 wrote: post #82
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…

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

AFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to any investor.
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