I will sign back up for a paid service when funding Russian search engine Yandex is dropped. Many like to forget there is a war.
Do you use any American tech companies? There’s another war, FYI
Fair Pricing
351–360 of 512 posts
Re: Fair Pricing
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.
tbh, these e-mails can also prompt unsubscribing. because then I actually remember that I am still subscribed to that thing.
People also forget that they're subscribed to something (or that they signed up for emails either explicitly or implicitly), so they just report to Google (or whoever) as spam. I'm sure that's why I get a lot of email (mostly in my Gmail Promotions or Updates tabs that are from companies that scanned me at some event or whatever or I ordered something from.
Re: Fair Pricing
#353This 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…
> Compare to ChatGPT, which is much more expensive, but the value relative to Google is pretty obvious.
What is the value of ChatGPT relative to Google? It's not obvious to me.
Re: Fair Pricing
#354Well, this tipped the scale, and I just subscribed. Honestly, so refreshing to have a normal search engine after 2 years of nonstop AI crap thrown at my face.
Re: Fair Pricing
#355Still no revision of the Yandex partenership.
Spending money on Kagi is spending some on Yandex, owned by the Russian terrorist state.
Re: Fair Pricing
#356I would have purchased several services over the years if they had a pricing like this, which ultimately I did not (because they did not). In particular there was some video editing software for $20/mo, but I knew I'd probably go months between using it. I'd have gladly paid $20/mo when using it, but it would stick in my craw the months I didn't use it.
Re: Fair Pricing
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the streaming services did this, I'd probably have pretty much all of them. Then, instead of paying monthly, you essentially have a tab open with everyone, and you pay for whatever you stream. Indeed, this would make me way less annoyed at the thousand and one streaming services popping up like mushrooms after a rainy day.
It's a very slippery path towards per-watch pricing with "rent this episode for just $0.99"... and that will be horrible.
You can do this now with all the On-demand stores. But it quickly becomes more economical to buy a bundle.
Re: Fair Pricing
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
What search engine do you use?
Mostly DDG, but that's beside the point. Kagi seems to be marketed at the general public, for whom FAANG companies control the narrative. Even though they are obviously bad actors wrt privacy and UX dark patterns, they claim otherwise, that they value privacy and strive for the best user experience, and having a startup just claim that they do better, but offers no hard guarantee and require a payed sign-up to actual…
> Mostly DDG
Why do you trust what DDG says but not Kagi?
> require a payed sign-up to actually try it out with a pricing incomprehensible to most of the world
There is a free tier (no card required) and the billing is done per search. It’s that simple.
Re: Fair Pricing
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn. That's fine.
It's not fine to the millions of monthly active users who would have to cancel because prices rose from 14€ to 16€. It's inherently a consumer-hostile action to pass such a law, despite how it first appears.
This sounds like you're arguing that it's more customer-friendly for people who forgot to unsubscribe to subsidize people who are actually using it. "Churn" is just another word for people leaving when the costs exceed the value of the service, and as such is entirely beneficial to consumers. Low churn often means consumer-hostile actions like making it hard to unsubscribe or failing to remind users they're subscribed, other than the occasional service that has such obvious and widespread value that customers never unsubscribe. I struggle to think of examples of those services, where neither I nor anyone I know would want to unsubscribe. I can think of a few that I paid for too long because cancelling was a pain in the ass (up to and including cancelling cards because it was easier).
Re: Fair Pricing
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Kagi has taken some investment, mostly from its users: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
Disclosure: I work at Kagi