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Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

blog.kagi.com

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Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#41

Post by godelski »

yoshicoder wrote: post #23
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 don't have exact numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if 80-90% of google ad revenue comes from the ad prices they can charge for US users. I would be shocked if the percentage was less than 50-60% of revenue from US alone, which would put the value extraction per user for google at ~10$/month/user

Sorry, I mean that the revenue seems to not just be search ad revenue but ad revenue. Google's ad revenue comes from a lot of places, such as in your Android app. I assume it also includes adsense and other things.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#42

Post by bloomingkales »

dgacmu wrote: post #29
bloomingkales wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could embed the subscription level into the blind signature.

But they still couldn't do accounting / query limiting for users on a limited queries per month plan. So you could do "yes you have assistant" or "no you don't" but their $5/month taster plan has a query limit.

Yeah, I guess the only way would be to keep reissuing an updated embedded signature with updated query count.

I don’t know the cost or liability of that at scale.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#43

Post by freedomben »

freediver wrote: post #31
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.

(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.

I'd love to pay for Kagi with crypto, the main thing for me is the steep transfer fees. Nevertheless those can be offset somewhat with bulk payments. How about ability to buy like 3 years of Kagi at a time with crypto?

When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#44

Post by freedomben »

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 thought this too but at this point I've been subscribed well over a year. On a typical workday I might use 20+ searches, but I frequently use little to no searches on weekends and holidays, etc. Ultimately I end up using right around 300 per month (averaged out across the year), so I think their pricing isn't as wild as it initially looks.

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#46

Post by kobieps »

freedomben wrote: post #43
freediver wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

I'd love to pay for Kagi with crypto, the main thing for me is the steep transfer fees. Nevertheless those can be offset somewhat with bulk payments. How about ability to buy like 3 years of Kagi at a time with crypto? When I try to go into billing in Kagi I just get forwarded to Stripe. Does Stripe process the crypto payments?

paying with bitcoin lightning has close to zero transfer fees

edit: on desktop, on the page where you choose your plan, scroll to the bottom and look for the link to paying with OpenNode (btc lightning)

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#47

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

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 don't know nor do I really care what other search companies are making. I pay $10/month for Kagi because it works for me and it's good. I don't even care about Kagi as a company (I don't care about any company); their search works. It's a good product, and I'm happy to keep paying for it as long as it keeps being useful while all the free competitors are still terrible. I use about 2k searches per month.

edit: Even just the ability to rank, pin, and block domains alone is crazy useful. I never need to see Pinterest in any image search results again. If I see a crappy blog spam site, I just block it and it never shows up again. It feels like these are basic, fundamental features that every search engine should have had a long time ago. It's pretty sad that Kagi is getting so much praise for doing things that really should have been standard for at least a decade (not sad in any negative way toward Kagi, but because our standards and expectations for search have dropped this low).

Re: Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

#48

Post by tonygiorgio »

This is sick, fantastic work.

I have built blind signature authentication stuff before (similar to privacy pass) and one thing I’m curious about is how you (will) handle multi device access?

I understand you probably launched with only unlimited search users in order to mitigate the same user losing access to their tokens on a different device. But any ideas for long term plans here? When I built these systems in the past, I always had to couple it with E2EE sync. Not only can that be a pain for end users, but you can also start to correlate storage updates with blind search requests.

Either case, this is amazing and I’m gonna be even more excited to not just trust Kagi, but verify that I don’t need to trust y’all. Congrats.

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